Tag Archives: telescope

Astronomy News

James Webb Telescope unfurls the sunshade

The James Webb telescope is unfurling its sunshade. It will take awhile!

And then it starts unfolding the mirror. This is origami on steroids!

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/29/1068727334/the-james-webb-space-telescope-has-started-unfurling-its-giant-sunshield

The successful deployment of the sunshield will keep the temperature of its instruments just above absolute zero, which in turn will minimize infrared background “noise” in the form of heat from the sun.

The main mirror assembly of the James Webb Space Telescope during testing at a Northrop Grumman facility in Redondo Beach, Calif., last year.

 

The sunshield maneuver is being performed as Webb speeds toward a spot known as L2, which is beyond the orbit of the moon where gravitational influences are in balance, providing a stable observing post. That journey will take about a month.

The next step major step after deploying Webb’s sun shade is unfolding the telescope’s primary mirror — assembled from 18 smaller gold-coated hexagonal mirrors made of beryllium. Once fully aligned, they will stretch 256 inches, or more than 21 feet, across.

 

Astronomy News

Astronomers want to plant telescopes on the Moon

Astronomers want to plant telescopes on the Moon

The lunar surface offers advantages for infrared and radio astronomy, despite the challenges.

By Ramin Skibba, Inside Science | Published: Tuesday, January 19, 2021

(Inside Science) — For decades, even before the iconic Hubble telescope took flight, astronomers have been launching spacecraft into orbit in the hopes of avoiding atmospheric effects that blur images taken by telescopes on Earth. But to catch clear signals of some cosmic objects, even those orbits aren’t high enough.

A group of astronomers now make the case for assembling and planting telescopes on the Moon. In a series of newly published papers, they argue that our lunar neighbor, especially its far side, makes an excellent place for telescopes in the radio and infrared range. These telescopes could discover and study potentially life-friendly planets outside our solar system and explore the little-understood “dark ages” of the young universe, around a million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars formed.

“This is the time to start discussing projects on the Moon. There’s a huge international focus on returning to the Moon, and we wanted to make sure that science gets considered as a priority,” said Joseph Silk, a University of Oxford astrophysicist who authored multiple papers in the series.

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Astronomy News

Ideas for future lunar telescopes

Full article with historical context is here.

NasaTelescopeOnTheMoonBase
Astronomers’ hopes for lunar scientific observatories have typically been tied to future Moon bases, which have remained far-fetched. NASA

Capturing previously inaccessible radio waves has been a dream of astronomers for decades. Some 40 years ago, scientists started seriously considering what different types of lunar telescopes might be able to discover, as well as how they could be built.

Even then, according to a NASA document titled “Future Astronomical Observatories on the Moon,” scientists realized that the Moon offered a unique vantage point that could open up “the last window in the electromagnetic spectrum at very low frequencies.”

By the early 1980s, the Apollo missions were a decade in the rearview, but the burgeoning Space Shuttle Program was looking like a success. This led to renewed talks of returning to the Moon. Researchers hoped these developments might eventually lead to Moon bases that would enable the infrastructure for sustained scientific studies.

“The only way we could conceive of putting scientific instruments on the Moon was with astronauts,” says University of Colorado Boulder astronomer Jack O. Burns. He serves as director of the NASA-funded Network for Exploration and Space Science, and for decades has been the lead crusader for building telescopes on the Moon.

Now, for the first time — thanks to modern robotics and the emergence of private spaceflight companies — Burns thinks this once-crazy idea can actually become a reality. His students now routinely work with remotely operated robots and machine learning algorithms — things that would have been unimaginable in the 1980s, he says. “Technology has caught up, and maybe that’s what we needed.”

Due to these technological advancements and more, lunar telescopes no longer require astronaut construction crews and $100 billion space programs. Instead, they could be built using rovers sent on privately built rockets that are already under development.