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NASA's working on a telescope with an even wider eye than Hubble
NASA said Thursday that it's getting down to business building a new telescope that could get us a step closer to finding E.T. and perhaps reveal other mysteries of the universe along the way.
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will have capabilities that make it similar to taking Hubble's telescope and putting a panoramic lens on it. It will carry a wide-field instrument allowing it to capture images with the same depth and quality as Hubble, but covering 100 times its field of view.
In addition to having such a wide view of parts of space, WFIRST will also sport a coronagraph that can block the glare from individual stars to better characterize not only planets orbiting those, but the atmospheres of planets as well.
"It will also develop technology that will pave the way for finding and characterizing Earth-like planets in the future," said Nikole Lewis of the Space Telescope Science Institute in a statement.
Much of the heavy lifting of identifying exoplanets has been shouldered by the Kepler Space Telescope, which is now far past its prime and continues operating in a mechanically crippled condition. But that will soon change with the impending launches of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set for 2017 and 2018, respectively.
WFIRST will follow those two into space in the 2020s, succeeding current workhorses like Hubble, Kepler and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Combined, they will create a next-generation three-pronged attack to find new planets, including Earth "cousins" that could be habitable.
The current running total of confirmed exoplanets stands at just over 2,000, but NASA expects that WFIRST alone will net thousands more exoplanet discoveries just from staring at the crowded central region of our own Milky Way galaxy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 22 2016, @12:26AM
So, the National Reconnaissance Office [nro.gov] (NRO, the space spies who actually help with sitrep, weather, and natural disasters -- Good spies, not NSA LOVEINT spies), gave NASA not one, but TWO Hubble-class telescopes as hand me downs. The NRO had them in orbit and said that as long as NASA didn't point them at earth, they could have control of the two spy sats. [space.com]
The only problem is, they don't have long range optics to focus things. They're designed for HD images of the up-close planet, but the mirror and dimensions are about the same as Hubble. Why don't we come up with a plan to use them?
NASA said they might be able to use them as part of an asteroid hunting network, or maybe fling one to Mars to take some up-cloese pictures there. Three telescopes NASA has right now already have a combined "eye" TWO TIMES wider than Hubble. Now, it may be true that they have more retina area, but they have shit optics. And when we're talking radio arrays, as you likely are, then "optics" means focusing power. While it's great to be able to see a bunch of space at high sensitivity, it's also necessary to see in more than just the radio spectrum, and to see a small spot very far away. You can only do so much in post processing.
Protip: The USA doesn't have any problem getting to space without our shuttles. NASA is not the only space program, we only give money to Russia to get astronauts to orbit for diplomacy. NRO launches the biggest rockets in the world. [space.com]
Cue the jingle: The More You Know....