- 3012 - TELESCOPE - Roman searches further? - Hubble, Chandra, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, telescopes have shed light on our place in our universe beyond the wildest imaginations. There is so much more to learn. Dark matter is thought to make up some 85 percent of the universe' total mass, dark matter has eluded our astronomers.
---------------------------- 3012 - TELESCOPE - Roman searches further?
- In 2025, NASA will launch a telescope designed to unravel the mystery behind dark matter. The telescope, a continuation of the Hubble Space Telescope's legacy, is named for one of the scientists who inspired that telescope, Nancy Grace Roman.
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- This new telescope will be the most advanced effort yet in trying to find worlds that resemble the planets in our Solar System, as well as unravel the mystery behind dark matter and dark energy.
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- The size of its lens will offering a panoramic field view 100 times larger than that of the Hubble. It will survey 100 million stars and aims to discover 2,500 new exoplanets.
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- Previous missions such as “Kepler” and “Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite” have found more than 4,000 exoplanets. They were mostly large planets, orbiting around dim stars.
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- The Roman Space Telescope will search for Earth-like, smaller, rocky planets which orbit around bright stars in the hopes of finding a habitable world similar to ours.
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- The telescope's camera is just as sensitive as the one on the Hubble Space Telescope, but with a much larger field of view. That means that Roman will be able to capture an area of the sky that's 100 times larger than the images captured by Hubble.
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- Roman will search for exoplanets using a technique known as “microlensing“. The gravitational fields of large objects such as stars will actually bend and magnify the light coming from an object behind them, which produces a halo in space.
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- When a star passes in front of another star, it will bend the star's light, making it bright like a lens. If that star has an exoplanet orbiting around it, the planet's gravitational field will also have the same effect, making it even brighter.
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- Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up the bulk of the universe, and may be responsible for the universe's expansion. It is an unknown form of energy that fills up space, and yet has never been directly observed.
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- Dark matter alone is though to make up around 27 percent of the universe, while normal matter, the stuff that we are able to observe, is believed to only be about five percent.
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- Rather than trying to observe dark energy, the Roman Space Telescope will study how the distribution of galaxies and dark matter has changed over the billions of years of the universe's existence. The telescope will also study the death of stars that took place billions of years ago by using ancient supernovae as a marker of time.
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- Since dark energy may be responsible for the universe's expansion, observing how the universe has evolved over time will help scientist better understand this strange force at work.
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- Hubble Space Telescope has been in operation for 30 years. It was initially meant to go offline this year, but the date was pushed to the year 2025.
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- Hubble will be not only be followed by the Roman Space Telescope, but by the James Webb Telescope as well.
The Roman Space Telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman. It was initially known as the Wide Field Infrared Space Telescope (WFIRST), NASA renamed it as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in 2020 to commemorate the legacy of Roman who died in 2018.
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- Roman paved the way for women in the field of astronomy. She was the first Chief of Astronomy in the Office of Space Science at NASA Headquarters and the first woman to hold an executive position at NASA.
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- Roman is often referred to as the 'Mother of Hubble' as she set up a committee of astronomers and engineers in the 1960s for the development of space telescopes, which later lead to the birth of the Hubble Space Telescope.
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- This telescope will hover about 930,000 miles above the Earth in the direction opposite the Sun. Its primary mirror is 7.9 feet across. However, the mirror only weighs 410 pounds thanks to major advancements in technology.
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- The telescope carries a 300-megapixel infrared camera known as the Wide Field Instrument. Each of its images will capture a patch of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full Moon.
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- Over the first five years of observations, Roman will image over 50 times as much sky as Hubble covered in its first 30 years.
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- The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has taken another step towards first light, projected for some time in 2022. Its enormous 3200 megapixel camera just took its first picture during lab testing at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The camera is the largest ever built, and its unprecedented power is the driving force behind the Observatory’s ten year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).
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- When paired with the 8.4 meter primary mirror, the camera is an impressive, data-producing monstrosity. Its focal plane contains 189 separate charge-coupled devices (CCDs) that each capture 16 megapixels. Each 3200 megapixel image would take
3,784K ultra-high-definition TV screens to display.
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- Each image is so huge, that a single one captures an area of sky equivalent to 40 full moons. The team behind the camera says that the image sensors are so powerful that it’ll be able to “see” objects that are 100 million times dimmer than the naked eye could see. At that level of sensitivity, you could see a candle from thousands of miles away.
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- The completion of the LSST Camera focal plane and its successful tests is a huge victory by the camera team that will enable Rubin Observatory to deliver next-generation astronomical science. For ten years, the observatory will capture over 20 terabytes of data each night. By the end of its ten year survey, it will have produced 60 petabytes.
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- So much data will be produced, in fact, that there will be two dedicated 40 GB high speed fiber-optic data lines to handle it. All of that data will travel to the Archive Center in the US. There, it’ll be processed and stored, and made available to the community.
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- The Rubin Observatory will generate an extraordinary amount of data, and managing it requires high speed fiber optics and a data facility. All of this image gathering and processing will create the Rubin Observatory’s output: panoramic wide field images of the southern sky, one every few nights for 10 years. All those images will add up to one big, ten year long video of the night sky.
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- That will be the Rubin Observatory’s primary contribution to astronomy: the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The LSST will be a catalog of some 20 billion galaxies, more galaxies than there are humans. It will find all kinds of transient objects, like asteroids zipping around our Solar System, as well as distant supernovae. It’ll help map out dark matter and dark energy, and also our own Milky Way.
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- The camera sensor system is made up of units called rafts. Each raft contains several sensors each, and there are two types of rafts. 21 rafts contain nine sensors each, and those 21 are responsible for acquiring the images. Then there are four specialty rafts. They contain three sensors each, and are responsible for focusing the camera, and synchronizing with the rotation of the Earth.
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- The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) camera team has installed the first of 21 science rafts, 3-by-3 arrays of state-of-the-art imaging sensors. Together the imaging system will take unprecedented 3,200-megapixel images of the night sky, which, over time, will produce the world's largest astrophysical movie.
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- These data will improve our knowledge of how galaxies have evolved over time and will let us test our models of dark matter and dark energy more deeply and precisely than ever.
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- The LSST Camera’s focal plane has a surface area large enough to capture a portion of the sky about the size of 40 full moons. Its resolution is so high that you could spot a golf ball from 15 miles away.
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- It’s taken the camera team several months to install the rafts onto the focal plane. The rafts are very expensive pieces of equipment. Each one can cost up to $3 million, and the tolerances in the installation are extremely tight. The space between each raft is less than five human hairs wide. The imaging sensors can also crack if they touch each other.
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- To capture these first few images, the sensors were cooled to their operating temperature of -101 C (-150 F). Since the entire camera isn’t assembled yet, the team projected images onto the focal plane with a 150 micron pinhole.
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- Objects used for the test images, were a head of Romanesco broccoli. With the tight specifications we really pushed the limits of what’s possible to take advantage of every square millimeter of the focal plane and maximize the science we can do with it.
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- The next step is assembly of the entire camera. The focal plane and the cryostat will be inserted into the camera body, along with its three lenses. One of those lenses, at 1.57 meters (5.1 feet) in diameter, is thought to be the world’s largest high-performance optical lens.
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- There’s also the shutter, and a filter exchange system. Altogether, the camera will be about the size of an SUV, and by 2021 it’ll be assembleed and ready for final testing. After that, it’ll be shipped to Chile.
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- Nearing completion of the camera is very exciting, and we’re proud of playing such a central role in building this key component of Rubin Observatory. It’s a milestone that brings us a big step closer to exploring fundamental questions about the universe in ways we haven’t been able to before.
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- One of the things that makes the Vera C. Rubin Observatory so special is the fact that it images the same areas of the sky over and over in rapid succession. All of that activity is largely automated. This means that it’ll spot transient objects and will be able to alert other observatories to things like supernovae.
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- That’ll allow powerful telescopes coming online soon, like the Extremely Large Telescope, to bring their power to bear on them in a way that the Rubin Observatory can’t. A test image from the imaging sensors on the Vera Rubin Observatory. Since the sensors are not integrated with the lenses yet, the team used a pinhole to capture the image of Romanesco broccoli.
- All of this exquisite image data will also be accessible to the rest of us. In 2007, Google announced their involvement with the project. While the LSST’s data will be available to researchers in a more raw form, Google wants to use their data expertise to make LSST data more accessible to the public. They’re hoping to provide digital coverage of things like supernovae, asteroids, and distant galaxies.
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- The Vera Rubin Observatory’s catch words are “wide, deep, and fast.” It’ll repeatedly survey the night sky with a wide field of view, with high-resolution depth, and it’ll do it quickly. There’s never been anything like it.
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- And the fact that anybody with an internet connection will be able to share in the discoveries and images means that the Rubin Observatory could inspire generations of future astronomers, the same way the Hubble Space Telescope has
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--------------------------------Other reviews available:
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- 3007 - TELESCOPE - Roman Space Telescope. Will trump those images with images equivalent to 100 Hubble Ultra-Deep Fields at once. The Telescope is scheduled to launch in 2025 on a five-year mission. It’ll perform cutting-edge research into some of the compelling questions surrounding cosmology and exoplanets.
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- 2812 - TELESCOPES - around the world. In 2020 a white paper was published that points out the potential benefits of coordinating ground, orbital and in “situ” based observations of objects. It suggests a different path forward where all of the space science community can benefit from the type of coordinated output that can only come from a cohesive team on the same objective.
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- 2798 - TELESCOPES - James Webb launch in 2021? - The James Webb Space Telescope will be a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. The telescope will be launched from French Guiana.
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- 2789 - TELESCOPES - to do a 3D map of the Universe. Since 2005, scientists have been scanning the night sky to create a three-dimensional map of our universe with the purpose of shedding light on one of the biggest mysteries in physics. The quest is to learn the true nature and identity of dark energy and dark matter.
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- 2565 - TELESCOPES - come in all shapes and sizes. I know you have in your mind’s eye what a telescope looks like. This Review will surprise you because it explores all different types of telescopes that in turn explore the full electromagnetic spectrum.
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January 29, 2021 TELESCOPE - Roman searches further? 3012
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--------------------- --- Tuesday, February 2, 2021 ---------------------------
