Eyes In The Sky With NASA's Space Telescope Completed

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    • Publish Date: Nov 3 2016 2:03PM
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    • Updated Date: Nov 3 2016 2:03PM
Eyes In The Sky With NASA's Space Telescope Completed

Nasa has successfully completed building its largest space telescope, which will be 100 times more powerful than the Hubble probe and may find the first galaxies that formed in the early universe. The James Webb Space Telescope will be the successor to Nasa's 26-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. The Webb telescope's infrared cameras are so sensitive that it needs to be shielded from the rays of the Sun.
         The future, it is often said, belongs to those who plan for it. And astronomers have been busy working the proverbial smoke-filled rooms (or whatever passes for them today) where the destiny of big science is often shaped and crisscrossing one another in airports on fund-raising trips. Now they are about to have something to show for it. More than a decade after competing groups set out to raise money for gargantuan telescopes that could study planets around distant stars and tune into the birth of galaxies at the dawn of time, shovels, pickaxes and more sophisticated tools are now about to go to work on mountaintops in Hawaii and Chile in what is going to be the greatest, most expensive and ambitious spree of telescope-making in the history of astronomy. The European Southern Observatory is a consortium of 14 European nations and Brazil, which has agreed to join but is still waiting for its Parliament to ratify the move. Brazil’s official entrance would put the group more than 90 percent of the way toward the $1.5 billion in 2012 dollars the telescope is projected to cost, enough to begin big-ticket items like a dome, said Lars Christensen, a spokesman for the consortium. The telescope should be ready on June 19, 2024. “We’ll all be back here,” said Tim de Zeeuw, the group’s director general, at the groundbreaking. That’s not the only mega telescope project out there. Two years ago, another group of astronomers blasted away the top of another mountain in Chile, Las Campanas, where they plan to build the Giant Magellan Telescope. That telescope will have at its heart a set of seven eight-meter mirrors ganged together to make the equivalent of a mirror 25 meters in diameter. Three of those mirrors have been cast and polished at the University of Arizona, one of the Giant Magellan partners. A fourth mirror is on order for next year.


Big Mirrors, Big Views
Hale reflector on Palomar Mountain, in San Diego County, was considered the practical earthly limit, but in the 1980s, astronomers devised ways to build bigger, thinner, mirrors that would not sag, leading to a bevy of eight-meter mirrors as well as the two 10-meter Kecks. The Magellan, the smallest of the new breed, however, will be six times as powerful as the Kecks in scooping up distant dim starlight; the others will be even more powerful. The Hubble Space Telescope is only 94 inches, about 2.4 meters in diameter. It gains its power not from size but from being above the atmosphere, which blurs and filters the light from stars. Increasing their powers even more, the new telescopes will be equipped with a technology that did not exist the last time around: adaptive optics, the ability to adjust the shape of the mirrors to minimize or cancel the effects of the atmospheric turbulence that causes stars to twinkle. The result, astronomers say, is that these telescopes will be able to detect fainter objects than Hubble can, like planets or bits of galaxies coming together, and more clearly.


Lookout for bigger telescope
In what they termed “a call to arms,” an organization of American university astronomers said last week that NASA should begin planning now to launch a sort of supersize version of the Hubble Space Telescope in the 2030s to look for life beyond Earth. This High Definition Space Telescope would be five times as big and 100 times as sensitive as the Hubble, with a mirror nearly 40 feet in diameter, and would orbit the sun about a million miles from Earth. Such a telescope, the astronomers said, would be big enough to find and study the dozens of Earthlike planets in our nearby neighborhood. It could resolve objects only 300 light-years in diameter — the nucleus of a small galaxy or a gas cloud on the way to collapsing into a star and planets, say — anywhere in the observable universe.


New telescopes aim to find out

 
 

SQUARE KILOMETRE ARRAY (SKA) RADIO TELESCOPE 
The Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) started peering into the universe from a remote cattle station in Western Australia state. With 36 antennas, ASKAP is the first building block in the SKA which will be based in Australia and South Africa. It should be fully operational by 2024. The new telescope will be 50 times more sensitive and 10,000 times faster than any other telescope on the planet, according to the international consortium funding the $2 billion project. The SKA central computer will have the processing power of about one hundred million PCs and will use enough optical fibre to wrap twice around the Earth. It will generate enough raw data to fill 15 million 64 GB iPods every day.

 
 
 

EUROPEAN EXTREMELY LARGE TELESCOPE (E-ELT)
The E-ELT will be located on a mountain at an altitude of 3,060 metres in the central part of Chile's Atacama Desert. It will aim to track down Earth-like planets around other stars in so-called "habitable zones" and will also carry out "stellar archaeology" in nearby galaxies. It is expected to have a mirror 40 metres in diameter, covering a field on the sky about a tenth the size of the full Moon. The primary mirror will consist of almost 800 segments, each 1.4 metres wide, but only 50 mm thick. The E-ELT's instruments will allow astronomers to probe the earliest stages of the formation of planetary systems and to detect water and organic molecules around stars in the making.
 

 
 
 
 
 
THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE
An international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), Webb will have a large mirror, 6.5 metres (21.3 feet) in diameter and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. It will be in an orbit about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from the Earth. Named after a NASA administrator who oversaw the early Apollo programmes, the project is a replacement for the Hubble Telescope. It is due to enter into service in 2018.
 

 
 
The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST)
This mission uniquely combines the ability to discover and characterise planets beyond our own solar system with the sensitivity and optics to look wide and deep into the universe in a quest to unravel the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter. WFIRST, slated to launch in the mid-2020s, is the agency's next major astrophysics observatory, following the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018. The WFIRST observatory will survey large regions of the sky in near-infrared light to answer fundamental questions about the structure and evolution of the universe, and expand our knowledge of planets beyond our solar system - known as exoplanets.

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Comments

Vishnu Varthan J Bethel Mat Hr Sec School

Very Informative.

Darshil Shah ST. XAVIERS - LOYOLLA -2 LOYOLLA 2

Wow! Great achievement by NASA.

Mansi Borade PADUA HIGH SCHOOL-MANKHURD

So expensive.And very unique news.

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