Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A new instrument being developed at the University of Colorado Boulder could be capable of capturing images up to 1,000 times sharper than those provided by the Hubble Space Telescope, officials at the university have revealed.
According to CBS News, the device is known as the Aragoscope in honor of French scientist Francois Arago, who was the first man to ever detect diffracted light waves around a disk. The Aragoscope would consist of an orbiting space telescope and an opaque disk in front of it that could be up to one-half mile across.
The researchers behind the instrument said that diffracted light waves from a target star or other type of object would bend around the edge of the disk, converging in a central location. The light would then be sent to the telescope in order to provide extremely high-resolution photographs.
The Aragoscope could allow scientists to image space objects like black hole “event horizons” and plasma swaps between stars, the CU-Boulder team claims. It could also be pointed at Earth, where its ability to image rabbit-sized objects could help find campers lost in the mountains.
Professor Webster Cash and his colleagues updated NASA on the progress of the novel telescope system last week. The Aragoscope was one of 12 proposed project granted Phase One funding by the US space agency’s Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) program last June. In April, six of those 12 projects will be awarded a two-year, $500,000 award as part of Phase Two funding.
“Traditionally, space telescopes have essentially been monolithic pieces of glass like the Hubble Space Telescope,” said Anthony Harness, a doctoral student in the university’s Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. “But the heavier the space telescope, the more expensive the cost of the launch. We have found a way to solve that problem by putting large, lightweight optics into space that offer a much higher resolution and lower cost.”
Part of the Agaroscope’s architecture comes from a previous project that earned Cash Phase One and Phase Two NIAC funding – a daisy-shaped “starshade” that would block light from a star while allowing light from its planets to leak around the image so that they could be imaged. For that reason, he believes his team is “in pretty good shape” entering Phase Two.
The Aragoscope would be placed in a geostationary orbit 25,000 miles above the Earth’s surface and would follow the planet’s rotation, making it appear as though it is motionless. The opaque disk would be make from a strong, dark plastic-type material that could be folded up like a parachute at launch and then unfurled once it reaches orbit. The space shield would be fastened to the telescope at distances of up to hundreds of miles, based on the size of the disk.
“The opaque disk of the Aragoscope works in a similar way to a basic lens. The light diffracted around the edge of the circular disk travels the same path length to the center and comes into focus as an image,” said Harness. Since the resolution of the image would increase along with telescope diameter, being able to launch a large but lightweight disk would allow for higher resolution images than smaller, traditional space telescopes, he added.
The CU-Boulder team plans to conduct a lab-based demonstration of the Aragoscope concept using a one-meter disk placed several meters from a telescope, and a light source that would be fixed between five and 10 meters behind the disk. In addition, they hope to test the starshade concept by fixing a space disk on a mountaintop, attaching a telescope on a hovering aircraft, and using it to capture an image of the binary star system Alpha Centauri.
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