For the 50th anniversary NASA has released some beautiful Panoramas pictures of Apollo missions.
NASA has planned to build a Starshade to look for Alien Planets. Starshade exoplanet-hunting missions may be technologically daunting, but they’re not beyond NASA’s reach, recent research suggests.
With this mission NASA will keep two spacecrafts, separated by thousands of miles, aligned within 3 feet of each other.
According to space.com “such a mission would employ a space telescope and a separate craft flying about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) ahead of it. This latter probe would be equipped with a large, flat, petaled shade designed to block starlight, potentially allowing the telescope to directly image orbiting alien worlds as small as Earth that would otherwise be lost in the glare”.
[Instruments called coronagraphs, which have been installed on multiple ground-based and space telescopes, work on the same light-blocking principle. But coronagraphs are incorporated into the telescope itself’.
“The distances we’re talking about for the starshade technology are kind of hard to imagine,” Michael Bottom, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
“If the starshade were scaled down to the size of a drink coaster, the telescope would be the size of a pencil eraser, and they’d be separated by about 60 miles [100 kilometers],” Bottom added. “Now imagine those two objects are free-floating in space. They’re both experiencing these little tugs and nudges from gravity and other forces, and over that distance we’re trying to keep them both precisely aligned to within about 2 millimeters.”
“We can sense a change in the position of the starshade down to an inch, even over these huge distances,” Bottom said in the same statement.
Source: Text; Space.com
mage credit; Space.com
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