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Trends made a selection of eight existing and upcoming space telescopes that have changed or will change our understanding of space
In 1610, Galileo Galilei and Simon Marius independently discovered the moons of Jupiter, which became one of the most important scientific events of that time. Nearly four centuries later, the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope ushered in a new revolution in astronomy.
The main problem of optical astronomy is the inhomogeneity of the earth’s atmosphere. Areas with different densities, air speeds lead to the twinkling of stars, visible to the naked eye. This makes space the only place where a telescope can get a really clear and comprehensive view of the universe.
This material tells about the most significant projects of space telescopes, while we have a separate review dedicated to the largest ground-based observatories.
Also, astrophysicist Sergei Popov told Trends about how new technologies have turned astronomy into a fashionable and in-demand science. Why shouldn’t we expect that in the future we will “move” to another planet, and what is the use of these astronomical discoveries for all of us?
Release of the podcast “There will be no lecture” Trends with Sergey Popov about why we will never be able to move to another planet:
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Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Telescope, named after Edwin Hubble, was launched into orbit on April 24, 1990. This is a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency, conceived as a general purpose observatory for the study of the universe in the visible, ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. It is one of NASA’s Large Observatories.
On May 20, 1990, the telescope took the first photograph of the star cluster NGC 3532.
Hubble orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 540 km and is tilted 28,5 degrees to the equator. It takes 95 minutes to make one revolution.
The orbiting telescope has made over 1 million observations and provided data that astronomers have used to write over 18 peer-reviewed scientific publications, from planet formation to giant black holes. These documents were mentioned in other publications more than 900 thousand times.
What is Hubble known for?
- Thanks to the study of pulsating stars, it was possible to determine the age of our Universe – 13,8 billion years.
- In January 1992, astronomers confirmed the existence of planets outside the solar system.
- The telescope recorded a rare phenomenon – the collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994. These are the first ever photographs of the collision of two objects in the solar system.
- The telescope captured the evolution of Jupiter’s weather in detail, including a rare storm near the planet’s equator.
- Hubble showed Pluto for the first time since the discovery of the planet in 1930.
- The spacecraft photographed a 400km-high plume of gas and dust from the eruption of Io, Jupiter’s largest inner moon.
- Confirmed the assumptions about the presence of supermassive black holes in the cores of Galaxies.
- Found the most distant space object known today – the galaxy GN-z11. Now we see it as it was 13,4 billion years ago.
- Confirmed the existence on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede of a huge underground ocean under a 150-kilometer ice layer. Based on this discovery, astronomers have included the largest satellite in the solar system in the list of possible candidates for the search for life forms.
- Discovered water vapor on exoplanet K2-18b from the habitable zone, as well as the first confirmed interstellar comet 2I/Borisov.
On June 13, 2021, the computer responsible for the Hubble scientific equipment stopped responding to commands from Earth. The engineering and scientific team servicing the telescope managed to fix the breakdown only by July 16, 2021.
The Hubble orbiter has two Twitter accounts – Hubble NASA and Hubble ESA, two official YouTube channels – NASA and ESA, as well as Instagram and Facebook accounts.
Images and data from the Hubble Space Telescope show galaxies as they were billions of years ago.
Space X-ray Observatory “Chandra”
The Chandra Observatory is a telescope specially designed to detect X-rays from very hot regions of the universe, such as exploding stars, galaxy clusters, and matter around black holes. The observatory got its name in honor of one of the greatest astrophysicists of the XNUMXth century, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, known for his work on white dwarfs. It is one of NASA’s Large Observatories.
The launch took place on July 23, 1999. The telescope was supposed to last five years. As a result, Chandra became the longest astronomical mission without service expeditions.
On account of “Chandra” are thousands of captured space objects and phenomena that helped scientists better understand the structure of our Universe and the processes taking place in it. The telescope shows the remnants of exploded stars, detects black holes throughout the universe, tracks the separation of dark matter in the collision of galaxies, and much more.
What is Chandra known for?
- Chandra’s first snapshot of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A showed astronomers a mysterious source at the center that could be a rapidly spinning neutron star or black hole.
- In the Crab Nebula, it was possible to distinguish shock waves around the central pulsar, invisible to other telescopes.
- With the help of the Chandra X-ray observatory, scientists have refined the Hubble constant, the number that determines the rate of expansion of the universe.
- The collision of superclusters of galaxies provided evidence of the existence of dark matter.
- Using data from the telescope, scientists have observed the largest X-ray flare ever detected from a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
- Images showing a highly distorted supernova remnant called W49B have led scientists to suspect the presence of the most recent black hole formed in the Milky Way galaxy.
- A new type of black hole has been discovered in the galaxy M82.
You can follow the life of Chandra on Twitter, on the YouTube channel, as well as on Instagram and Facebook.
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Fermi Space Gamma Telescope
The Fermi Telescope is an international multicenter observatory that studies space in the gamma-ray range.
Initially, the apparatus was called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope or GLAST. But on August 26, 2008, NASA renamed the telescope in honor of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The telescope was launched on June 11, 2008. Since then, Fermi has been orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 565 km. It scans the entire sky every three hours looking for gamma rays ranging in energy from 20 MeV to over 300 GeV. The telescope makes one revolution around our planet in 95 minutes.
By mapping the entire sky every three hours, Fermi is discovering the most extreme phenomena in the universe, from gamma-ray bursts and black hole jets to pulsars, supernova remnants and the origin of cosmic rays.
What is Fermi known for?
- The first scientific result of the telescope was the detection of a gamma-ray pulsar located in the supernova remnant CTA 1, which became the first known object “blinking” only in gamma rays.
- On September 15, 2008, Fermi detected a record burst of gamma rays in the constellation Carina, designated as GRB 080916 °C. The power of the explosion exceeded the power of about 9 thousand conventional supernovae.
- Fermi Bubbles. In 2010, scientists discovered a giant mysterious structure that looks like a pair of bubbles above and below the center of our galaxy. Each lobe is 25 light-years high, and together they extend about half the diameter of the Milky Way.
- On March 7, 2012, the telescope observed a flare with the highest energy ever seen from a solar eruption. At the peak of the flash, Fermi detected gamma rays 2 billion times the energy of visible light, or about 4 GeV.
- The telescope observed numerous gamma-ray flashes (short flashes during thunderstorms associated with lightning) on Earth. He found that they could produce 100 trillion positrons (the antiparticle of the electron, refers to antimatter), far more than scientists had previously thought.
Fermi does not lead such an active social life as his colleagues. The telescope has a Twitter account (not updated since fall 2019) and a Facebook page (last updated in September 2020).
TESS Orbital Telescope
TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) is a space telescope designed to discover exoplanets by the transit method (fixing the characteristic dips in brightness caused by the passage of a planet against the background of a star). Developed by MIT scientists as part of the NASA Small Research Program.
The orbiting telescope was launched on April 18, 2018 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. TESS is the first NASA Astrophysics satellite launched under contract with SpaceX.
The telescope observes space objects from a highly elliptical Earth orbit (HEO). For the first time, the gravitational attraction of the Moon is used as a trajectory-stabilizing force.
In the first year of operation, the telescope observed the southern hemisphere of the celestial sphere. The area of the sky was divided into 13 sectors, for each of which TESS spent 27 days. On July 18, 2019, the first phase of the mission was completed. By the same principle, the telescope worked for a year in the Northern Hemisphere. From August 2020, the device began an extended mission, which is expected to last until September 2022.
As a result, TESS has covered about 75% of the sky with its gaze, discovered about 66 confirmed exoplanets and recorded evidence of more than 2 candidate planets orbiting bright neighboring stars. In the future, the James Webb telescope will study these candidate planets and determine if they can support life.
What is TESS known for?
- On September 18, 2018, a team of astronomers led by Chelsea Huang of MIT announced the first exoplanet discovered by a telescope in the Pi Mensae star system, about 60 light-years from Earth.
- On April 15, 2019, NASA announced the first TESS discovery of an Earth-sized planet. The planet HD 21749c is about 89% of the diameter of the Earth and orbits HD 21749, a K-type star (i.e. orange-colored stars with a surface temperature of 3800 to 5000 K) with a mass of about 70% of the Sun, located at a distance of 53 light years in southern constellation Reticulum. The planet is likely hot, with surface temperatures up to 427 °C.
- On January 6, 2020, NASA announced the discovery of TOI 700 d, the first Earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone discovered by TESS. The exoplanet orbits the star TOI 700, 100 light-years away in the constellation Dorado.
- In January 2021, scientists determined that TYC 7037-89-1 is the first six-star system ever discovered in which all stars participate in eclipses.
The telescope has a Twitter account. Also, information about the activities of TESS can be found on the NASA Exoplanets Facebook page.
Orbital Observatory “Spectr-RG”
The orbital astrophysical observatory “Spektr-RG” is designed to build a complete map of the Universe in the X-ray energy range. This is a project of the Federal Space Program of our country with the participation of Germany.
The observatory consists of two reflecting telescopes: the German eROSITA, operating in the soft X-ray range, and the Russian ART-XC, operating in the hard X-ray range. ART-XC is the first oblique-incidence telescope in our country.
On July 13, 2019, the observatory was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The Spektra-RG research will last 6,5 years. Of these, the telescope will scan the starry sky for four years, and the remaining 2,5 years will work in the mode of point observation of objects in the Universe at the request of the world scientific community. The Lagrange point (L2) 1,5 million km from the Earth was chosen as the location for the spacecraft.
According to Roskosmos, during the mission Spektr-RG will detect about 100 thousand massive galaxy clusters, about 3 million supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies, hundreds of thousands of stars with active coronas, tens of thousands of star-forming galaxies and many other objects, in including those of an unknown nature, and also investigates in detail the properties of hot interstellar and intergalactic plasma.
It is expected that in 2025 the most accurate map of the Universe built by the Spektra-RG telescopes will be completed and made public.
James Webb telescope
The James Webb Telescope (JWST) is an ambitious science project of NASA’s orbiting infrared observatory in collaboration with European and Canadian space agencies. The launch is scheduled for no earlier than November 2021.
Unlike Hubble, Webb is not intended to be serviced. The refrigerant reserve on it will be enough for about ten years. To ensure correct operation during this period, all critical subsystems of the telescope are duplicated.
Regular scientific data and images are expected to begin coming in from Webb about six months after launch.
The James Webb Telescope will be the largest, most powerful and complex space telescope ever built and launched into space. The size of the main mirror, with a width of 6,5 m and a collecting surface area of 25 sq. m, will allow Webb to observe distant galaxies at a distance of more than 13 billion light years.
The telescope will be located 1,5 million km from the Earth in the opposite direction from the Sun at the second Lagrange point (L2). It will see about 39% of the sky at any given time. Since the telescope must turn away from warm and close objects that might interfere with it, it will not be able to observe the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, or the Moon.
Four scientific instruments have unique features that will allow astronomers to study various space objects:
The telescope has a Twitter account, a YouTube channel, and pages on Instagram and Facebook.
Xuntian Optical Telescope
The Chinese Space Station (CSST) Xuntian or Sky Sentinel Telescope is an autonomous orbital module with an optical telescope.
The launch of Xuntian is scheduled for 2024. The telescope will revolve around the Earth in the same orbit as the Chinese modular station. He will be able to periodically approach and dock with her so that the crew can carry out the necessary repairs and change instruments.
The huge lens makes the Sky Sentinel comparable to the Hubble. At the same time, the view of the Chinese telescope will be 300 times larger at the same high resolution. Thanks to its wide field of view, it will be able to observe up to 40% of space for ten years.
The telescope of the Chinese Space Station will conduct observations in the near ultraviolet and visible light, as well as study the properties of dark matter, the formation and evolution of galaxies.
Space observatory “Spektr-UV”
The international project of the space observatory “Spektr-UV” will explore the Universe in the ultraviolet and visible ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum with high angular resolution, as well as register gamma radiation in the energy range from 10 keV to 10 MeV. The main work on the project is carried out by our country and Spain.
The space telescope with a 1,7 m mirror will be equipped with high- and low-resolution spectrographs to obtain high-resolution spectra and cameras for high-quality ultraviolet imaging. It will be able to compete with the Hubble telescope.
“Spektr-UF” will not be engaged in the search for planets, but will study the physicochemical composition of planetary atmospheres in the solar system and beyond, the physical and chemical properties of interstellar and circumstellar matter (gas and dust particles), the nature of active galactic nuclei, the chemical evolution of galaxies . An important task of Spektra-UV is the search for hidden matter, that is, gas and dust that are difficult to distinguish for existing telescopes.
The dates for the start of the Spektr-UV mission were postponed several times. The observatory is expected to start operating in autumn 2025. The launch is planned from the Vostochny cosmodrome.