SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

NASA scientists plan to demonstrate a revolutionary technology for studying hundreds of stars and galaxies at the same time—a new capability originally created for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

The technology, called the Next-Generation Microshutter Array (NGMSA), will fly for the first time on the Far-ultraviolet Off Rowland-circle Telescope for Imaging and Spectroscopy, or FORTIS, mission on October 27. The array includes 8,125 tiny shutters, each about the width of a human hair, that open and close as needed to focus on specific celestial objects.

[...] "FORTIS needed our new microshutter technology for science. We benefit from a test platform to advance the readiness of this design for use in space. It's a great synergy," said Matt Greenhouse, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Greenhouse and his colleague, Goddard technologist Mary Li, are advancing the technology with support from NASA's Strategic Astrophysics Technology (SAT) program.

[...] M33 is a spiral-disk galaxy littered with clusters of massive hot stars that have emerged within the past few million years from collapsing natal clouds of cold gas and dust. To study these bright clusters, which emit copious amounts of light at ultraviolet wavelengths, the FORTIS telescope will first locate the brightest clusters with its imager and an on-the-fly targeting algorithm will close all the tiny shutters except those coincident with the bright targets.

This will allow light to flow to the spectrograph where it will be broken into component wavelengths to reveal details about the physical conditions of the clusters and their surrounding material.

The microshutter technology gives scientists the ability to produce multiple spectra at once. This capability improves productivity on both sounding rocket missions, which offer only six minutes of observing time, or large space-based observatories, which can take up to a week to observe faint, far-away objects and gather enough light to obtain good spectra. With observing time at a premium, the ability to gather light from multiple objects at once is paramount.

Original Submission