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The University of Leicester announces today the signature of a contract to develop an innovative new type of X-ray mirror for a telescope to be flown on an orbiting observatory to be launched in 2021.
The Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) is a joint Chinese-French satellite observatory. Designed to study the most powerful explosions in the Universe out to the era of the first generation of stars, SVOM will locate hundreds of gamma-ray bursts signifying the deaths of massive stars.
University of Leicester scientists with its Space Research Centre instrumentation and engineering staff in the Department of Physics and Astronomy have developed a unique capability to make a new kind of super-light-weight X-ray focussing optic.
Traditional X-ray mirrors for space telescopes are made of solid glass or metal and weigh tens of kilograms or more. The new 'Lobster' X-ray mirror for SVOM weighs just one kilo, and so is much easier to launch into orbit.
Professor Julian Osborne, who is leading this work at Leicester explained: "Lobsters and similar animals use reflecting mirrors to focus light in their eyes, unlike the lenses used by people. We can make man-made Lobster-type mirrors with the very high degree of smoothness needed to focus X-rays, and make them robust enough to survive the rigours of a rocket launch."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @08:22PM
Nothing of substance here, except for the mention that this mission is being planned. No descriptions of the optics, no references, nothing. Just one simple cartoon would suffice to show a "traditional" x-ray mirror design and part of the "lobster" design. The scant description makes me think of other x-ray optics that use Fresnel zone like the Chandra Telescope [spie.org]. Presumably these guys are talking about replacing the refracting element and not the front-end grazing-incidence mirrors, but who knows from this article?
The PR release for this is talking about awarding the contract to build it, but doesn't have anything to say about whether it as been designed yet. I would think that if it has been designed, there would be a paper on its design out somewhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @09:15PM
Because new this gizmo is made out of some magic unicorn poop.
(Score: 2) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Tuesday October 27 2015, @03:52PM
Google "lobster eye" and you will get a host of images explaining instantly how they work. (I'm not sarcastically bashing your criticism; it's valid.) More importantly, the fifth article link [nasa.gov] is a three year-old NASA article saying the technology has been used for all-sky X-ray observation since the seventies.
I'm sure the new mirror is a great piece of tech but there's a touch of hyperbole in the press.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday October 29 2015, @10:47AM
You read that too quickly since it doesn't actually say that :)
Here's a slightly older 2006 article [le.ac.uk] with much more detail on the chronology of developments. It shows that the 2012 article you linked can inadvertantly be very misleading but even so your link also says the idea was /conceived of/ in the seventies (1977 to be precise) however it was the University of Leicester that brought the actual technology towards fruition. In particular due to professor George Fraser [le.ac.uk] who died last year [molcyt.org] :(
I strongly doubt that the technology would exist at the current level (or maybe at all) if not for the efforts of George Fraser. From the outside/as a bystander it loooked like a very hard fight to get it going with enough momentum. It could be that it might have only remained as an idea, not to say that he did everything by himself or anything like that, only that he was crucial to the developments that took place.
Found a paper [arxiv.org] (PDF 541 KB) that is at least close to what I was looking for and which explains some of the technology. It seems to me like that paper is written quite a bit later than the stuff I link further below and it might be something aimed mostly at internal consumption/presentation at NASA. That would explain why it doesn't reference the more substantial stuff but it was the closest I could find with a few quick searches.
There was at least one (old) very good news report somewhere but I haven't found it and can't seem to find the old ESA pages (probably gone) nor the original UoL pages (also likely gone, they were better at explaining it all than that paper above).
As mentioned in previous links Fraser and the UoL team tried to get it tested on the ISS hence the original name Lobster-ISS (not to be confused with the NASA stuff in the article you linked; beyond the sucky/clueless science journalism it seems those scientists are doing their own thing and/or expanding on the same general concept). Anyway I'm pretty sure Lobster-ISS never got launched, it was scheduled for launch in 2009 but this kind of thing happens a lot (sadly the US is quite famous for being a poor or somewhat unreliable partner in space matters and it's usually not NASAs fault), at least Lobster-ISS is not on the UoL missions page [le.ac.uk].
As your link mentions they (UoL) got something related going called MIXS [le.ac.uk] up on BepiColombo.
Various other papers (I had to search a bit and might as well share these):
- The 2001 paper "LOBSTER-ISS: an imaging x-ray all-sky monitor for the International Space Station" [harvard.edu], unfortunately it has been paywalled :( this paper is older than the one I first mentioned above and I'm pretty sure this is the one I wanted to find (I probably have a local copy somewhere but that's a big cumbersome search/too much hassle).
- There's also some stuff about Lobster-ISS in ESA BUlletin 110 [esa.int] (PDF) from 2002 (also older than the first paper I mentioned).
- There's a little bit about Lobster in "The gamma-ray burst monitor for Lobster-ISS" [uniurb.it] but not much really.
Sometimes trying to find old stuff makes me wish everything I did was piped to the Internet Archive's WaybackMachine :3
It is only circumstantial that I happen to know a little bit about Lobster-ISS, I was very interested in the technology.
Imagine a space future where the standard (augmented) visuals are all x-ray-interpretations replacing the blackness of space with lots of color everywhere, it might look a lot more like psychedelic art or scifi book covers than what we think of as "space" today but would also include a lot more visual reference points :) (that might all be my imagination more than anything else though lol).