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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope goes into ‘safe mode’ after software error

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) went into “safe mode” on Sunday after what the agency said was a “software error.”

NASA announced the glitch in a Sunday tweet, writing, that at approximately 4 a.m. ET, the HST “went into safe mode due to an onboard software error.”

HUBBLE TELESCOPE SOLVES MYSTERY OF STAR’S DIMMING

“The Hubble Space Telescope is in good condition but remains in safe mode as a precaution while the team works to fully understand the error encountered on Sunday and the associated safe mode response,” NASA told Fox News on Tuesday. “The team is working to return Hubble back to science operations as soon as possible.”

Safe mode is a setting that puts the telescope into a “stable configuration that suspends science observations” and positions the HST’s solar panels toward the sun to make sure its energy requirements are met. 

“The spacecraft remains in this configuration until ground control can correct or compensate for the issue,” NASA explained in an article in 2018. “The rest of the spacecraft and its instruments are still fully functional and are expected to produce excellent science for years to come.”

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope maintains its orbit around Earth.
(NASA)

This is not the first time the telescope has entered safe mode.

On Oct. 5, 2018, the spacecraft entered safe mode due to a failed gyroscope and on Jun. 15, 2009, the HST Science Instrument Command and Data Handler (SI C&DH)  began to send unexpected “zero” readings to the on-board HST 486 computer prompting safe mode to activate.

It remains unclear how long it will take to restore functionality this time.

In 2018, HST’s safety measures were in place for three weeks before the team was able to revive the telescope. 

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A joint venture between NASA and the European Space Agency, the HST launched into orbit in April 1990 aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

Since then, the telescope has delivered amazing images of the universe with more than 1.4 million observations over the course of its lifetime. 

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Hubble Space Telescope just entered ‘safe mode’

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NASA’s Hubble space telescope entered into “safe mode” due to a software error at around 4 a.m. ET on Sunday (March 7). But don’t worry, the telescope isn’t in danger of shutting down permanently.

“All science systems appear normal and Hubble is safe and stable,” the Hubble team wrote on Twitter. “The team is working [on] plans to safely return it to normal science operations.” 

Safe mode is a protective feature that temporarily stops science observations and orients the Hubble’s solar panels toward the sun to make sure it has enough power, according to an article NASA posted in 2018, the last time the telescope entered safe mode. The satellite remains in safe mode until ground control can fix the issue.

Related: 26 Cosmic Photos from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field

In 2018, Hubble went into safe mode after one of its gyroscopes — instruments that help orient the satellite — failed. About three weeks later, the team was able to remotely fix a backup gyroscope that wasn’t working properly, and Hubble returned to normal operations. It’s not yet clear what software error caused Hubble’s current stint of hibernation, and it’s also not clear how long recovery will take. 

Since its launch in 1990, the iconic Hubble space telescope has been gazing out into our universe, studying interstellar objects, planets, stars, supermassive black holes and space phenomena such as merging galaxies, according to NASA. And more than 30 years later —  double its planned lifetime — it’s still going strong. 

The Hubble telescope has made more than 1.4 million observations and fueled the publication of more than 18,000 peer-reviewed science papers. 

“In its over 30 years of operation, Hubble has made observations that have captured humanity’s imaginations and deepened our knowledge of the cosmos,” according to NASA. “It will continue to do so for years to come.”

NASA hasn’t yet released an official statement on Sunday’s “safe mode” incident.

Originally published on Live Science.



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Scientists are casting one of the largest telescope mirrors ever made on Earth

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Scientists started on Friday casting one of the largest telescope mirrors ever made on Earth for the Giant Magellan Telescope being built in Chile.

Why it matters: The huge telescope is designed to one day peer into the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets around far-off stars, learn more about early galaxies and study other objects of interest.

What’s happening: The mirror is being crafted in Arizona using the only spinning furnace in the world designed for this kind of casting.

  • On Saturday, the furnace will hit “high fire,” spinning at five revolutions per minute and heating the glass to 2,129 degrees Fahrenheit for about five hours to liquify it.
  • After that peak in heating, the glass will gradually cool for about a month while the furnace spins more slowly, eventually reaching room temperature about 2.5 months after high fire.
  • “Once cooled, the mirror will be polished for two years before reaching an optical surface precision of less than one thousandth of the width of a human hair or five times smaller than a single coronavirus particle,” the GMT organization wrote in a press release.

What’s next: The GMT’s first two mirrors are ready and in storage, with three others still in process. The seventh — and last — mirror is scheduled to be cast in 2023.

  • The team behind the telescope is also planning on crafting an eighth mirror as a spare.
  • The telescope is expected to see first light in 2029.

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Hubble telescope solves mystery of star’s dimming

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New findings from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have helped astronomers to solve the mystery of why Orion’s bright red supergiant Betelgeuse dramatically faded for a period of weeks last year. 

In examining the massive red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, astrophysicists from NASA and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis found that the same processes are occurring on a much larger scale.

WHO IS NASA ASTRONAUT KATE RUBINS?

The observation was published in the Feb. 4, 2021 edition of The Astronomical Journal, where the authors wrote that imaging and spectroscopy confirm a “record of high mass-loss events over the past few hundred years.”

“The similarity of this correspondence in VY [Canis Majoris] with the remarkable recent dimming of Betelgeuse and an outflow of gas is apparent,” they said. “The evidence for similar outflows from the surface of a more typical red supergiant suggests that discrete ejections are more common and surface or convective activity is a major source of mass loss for red supergiants.”

In a Thursday press release from NASA, the University of Minnesota’s Distinguished Professor Roberta Humphreys explained that Hubble data showed VY Canis Majoris behaving like Betelgeuse “on steroids.” 

This artist’s impression of the hypergiant star VY Canis Majoris reveals the star’s large convection cells and giant arcs. Credits: NASA, ESA, and R. Humphreys (University of Minnesota), and J. Olmsted (STScI)

In the case of the smaller star, researchers say that the dimming was due to an outflow of gas that may have formed dust which temporarily obstructed some of the star’s light. 

“I think the big takeaway about these results, is that the massive ejections or outflows from the star observed in the [Hubble] images and measured in the spectra are correlated with periods of great variability and deep minima in its light observed over two centuries,” Humphreys told Fox News on Friday. 

“We think this is due to activity or convection on the surface responsible for massive gaseous ejections,” she continued. “For example, we know that the sun has flares and outburst of flows of gas we see as prominences.”

NASA ASTRONAUTS EMBARK ON 236TH SPACEWALK AT INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

“In VY Canis Majoris — 30 [times the] mass of [the] sun and 300,000 more luminous — this is much more extreme,” she said. “These gaseous outflows may be as much as 10 times the mass of Jupiter.”

Arcs of plasma surround VY Canis Majoris, appearing to have been cast out from it by distances that are thousands of times farther away than the Earth is from the sun and over the past several hundred years.

However, other structures close to the millions of years-old star — which look like knots — are relatively compact and scientists working with Humphrey were able to date more recent eruptions to the 19th and 20th centuries when VY Canis Majoris faded to one-sixth of its original brightness.

The release notes that the hypergiant loses 100 times as much mass at Betelgeuse and is now only visible using a telescope.

“This is probably more common in red supergiants than scientists thought and VY Canis Majoris is an extreme example,” she said in the release. “It may even be the main mechanism that’s driving the mass loss, which has always been a bit of a mystery for red supergiants.”

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The future of the start is uncertain, but Humphreys said that the star is “obviously unstable.”

“This high mass loss will determine its eventual fate either as a supernova or black hole,” she said.

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The world’s largest telescope is edging closer to completion

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This week, the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory Mirror Lab began work on the sixth of seven primary mirror segments for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). On March 1st, the lab started heating its one-of-a-kind glass furnace to a temperature of 1,165 degrees Celsius. That in itself was a major milestone in a manufacturing process known as spin-casting. It took about four months to make the mold and another nine hours to cover it in nearly 90 tons of rare borosilicate glass.

On Friday, the furnace started to spin at about five revolutions per minute. The combination of heat and motion will force the glass up the mold’s sides as it melts, causing it to form a curved surface. Once the 8.4-meter mirror is cast over the weekend, it will enter a month-long “annealing” process that will see the furnace slowly come to a stop while the glass cools. That’s done so that the mirror cools uniformly, making the final product tough and free of as many imperfections as possible. It will take another month-and-a-half for it to cool to room temperature. It’s at that point that the lengthy process of polishing it can begin.

Manufacturing a single glass segment takes about four years to complete. In 2019, the university finished work on GMT’s second mirror. That one is now in storage, waiting to be transported to Chile. While the project broke ground in 2015, it won’t be complete until later in the decade. But once it is done, the GMT will be able to capture images that are 10 times clearer than those produced by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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New Technique Used to Spot Possible Super-Earth in Alpha Centauri’s Habitable Zone

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Astronomers using a new technique may have not only found a super-Earth at a neighbouring star, but they may also have directly imaged it. And it could be nice and cozy in the habitable zone around Alpha Centauri.

 

It’s much easier to see giant planets than Earth-size planets. No matter which detection method is being used, larger planets are simply a larger needle in the cosmic haystack. But overall, astronomers are very interested in planets that are similar to Earth. And finding them is much more difficult.

We thought we’d have to wait for the ultra-powerful telescopes currently being built before we could directly image exoplanets.

Facilities like the Giant Magellan Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope will bring enormous observing power to bear on the task of exoplanet imaging.

But a team of researchers have developed a new technique that might do the job. They say they’ve imaged a possible sub-Neptune/super-Earth-sized planet orbiting one of our nearest neighbours, Alpha Centauri A.

The team presented their observations in an article in Nature Communications titled “Imaging low-mass planets within the habitable zone of α Centauri.” The lead author is Kevin Wagner, an astronomer and Sagan Fellow at the University of Arizona.

While astronomers have found low-mass exoplanets before, they’ve never sensed their light. They’ve watched as the planets revealed themselves by tugging on their stars. And they’ve watched as the light from the stars that host these planets dips when the planet passes in front of the star.

 

But they’ve never directly imaged one. Until now, maybe.

This new detection method comes down to the infrared. One of the challenges in imaging Earth-sized exoplanets in infrared is to discern the light coming from an exoplanet when that light is washed out by all of the background infrared radiation from the star.

Astronomers can search for exoplanets in wavelengths where the background infrared is diminished, but in those same wavelengths, temperate Earth-like planets are faint.

One method is to look in the near-infrared (NIR) part of the spectrum. In NIR, the thermal glow of the planet is not so washed out by the star. But the starlight is still blinding, and millions of times brighter than the planet. So just looking in the NIR is not a total solution.

The solution may be the NEAR (New Earths in the AlphaCen Region) instrument used in this research. NEAR is mounted on the ESO (European Southern Observatory’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. It works with the VISIR instrument, also on the VLT. The group behind NEAR is the Breakthrough Watch, part of Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Initiatives.

 

The NEAR instrument not only observes in the desirable part of the infrared spectrum, but it also employs a coronagraph.

The Breakthrough group thought that the NEAR instrument used on an 8-meter ground-based telescope would allow for better observations of the Alpha Centauri system and its planets.

So they built the instrument in collaboration with the ESO and installed it on the Very Large Telescope.

This new finding came as a result of 100 hours of cumulative observations with NEAR and the VLT.

“These results,” the authors write, “demonstrate the feasibility of imaging rocky habitable-zone exoplanets with current and upcoming telescopes.”

The 100-hour commissioning run was meant to demonstrate the power of the instrument.

The team says that based on about 80 percent of the best images from that run, the NEAR instrument is an order of magnitude better than other methods for observing “…warm sub-Neptune-sized planets throughout much of the habitable zone of α Centauri A.”

They also, possibly, found a planet. “We also discuss a possible exoplanet or exozodiacal disk detection around? Centauri A,” they write. “However, an instrumental artifact of unknown origin cannot be ruled out.”

 

This isn’t the first time astronomers have found exoplanets in the Alpha Centauri system.

There are a couple of confirmed planets in the system, and there are also other candidates.

But none of them have been directly imaged like this new potential planet, which has the placeholder name C1, and is the first potential detection around the M-dwarf in the system, Proxima Centauri.

Follow-up observations will have to confirm or cancel the discovery.

It’s exciting to think that a warm-Neptune class exoplanet could be orbiting a Sun-like star in our nearest neighbouring star system. One of the Breakthrough Initiatives goals is to send lightsail spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri system and give us a closer look.

But that prospect is out of reach for now. And in some ways, this discovery isn’t so much about the planet, but about the technology developed to detect it.

The large majority of discovered exoplanets are gigantic planets similar in mass to Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. They’re the easiest to find. But as humans from Earth, we’re predominantly interested in planets like our own.

Earth-like planets in a star’s habitable zone get us excited about prospects for life on another planet. But they can also tell us a lot about our own Solar System, and how solar systems in general form and evolve.

If C1 does turn out to be a planet, then the Breakthrough group has succeeded in a vital endeavour. They’re the first to detect an Earth-like planet by direct imaging.

Not only that, but they did it with an 8-meter, ground-based telescope and an instrument specifically designed and developed to detect these types of planets in the Alpha Centauri system.

The authors are confident that NEAR can perform well, even in comparison to much larger telescopes. The conclusion of the paper contains a description of the overall sensitivity of the instrument. Then they write that “This would in principle be sufficient to detect an Earth-analog planet around α Centauri A (~20 µJy) in just a few hours, which is consistent with expectations for the ELTs.”

The E-ELT will have a 39-meter primary mirror. One of its capabilities and design goals is to image exoplanets, especially smaller, Earth-size ones, directly.

Of course, the E-ELT will be an enormously powerful telescope that will undoubtedly fuel scientific discovery for a long time, not just in exoplanet imaging but in a variety of other ways.

And other gigantic ground-based telescopes will change the exoplanet imaging game, too.

What took hours for NEAR to see may take only minutes for the E-ELT, the Thirty Meter Telescope, or the Giant Magellan Telescope to see.

NEAR can’t compete with those telescopes and was never meant to.

But if these results are confirmed, then NEAR has succeeded where nobody else has, and for a fraction of the price of a new telescope.

Either way, what NEAR has accomplished likely represents the future of exoplanet research. Rather than broad-based surveys like Kepler and TESS, scientists will soon be able to focus on individual planets.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

 

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Astronomers find origins of “galactic cannibalism” with discovery of ancient dark matter halo

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Astronomers have detected what they believe to be one of the earliest instances of “galactic cannibalism” — when one galaxy consumes one of its smaller neighbors — in an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy called Tucana II. The findings stem from the discovery of an ancient dark matter halo, located in a galaxy 163,000 light years from Earth. 

Tucana II is just one of dozens of dwarf galaxies surrounding the Milky Way. They are thought to be artifacts left over from the first galaxies in the universe — and Tucana II is among the most primitive of them. 

In a new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, astrophysicists report detecting nine previously unknown stars at the edge of Tucana II, using the SkyMapper Telescope in Australia and the Magellan Telescopes in Chile. The stars are shockingly far away from its center but remain in the small galaxy’s gravitational pull. 

The configuration of stars provides the first evidence that the galaxy contains an extended dark matter halo — a region of matter three to five times larger than scientists originally believed — in order to keep a gravitational hold on its distant stars. The findings suggest that the earliest galaxies in the universe were much more massive than previously believed. 

“Tucana II has a lot more mass than we thought, in order to bound these stars that are so far away,” one of the authors of the study, MIT graduate student Anirudh Chiti, said in a statement. “This means that other relic first galaxies probably have these kinds of extended halos too.”

Every galaxy is believed to be held together by a halo of dark matter, a type of hypothetical matter thought to make up over 85% of the universe, MIT News explains. But the new findings represent the first time one has been detected in an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy. 

“Without dark matter, galaxies would just fly apart,” Chiti said. “[Dark matter] is a crucial ingredient in making a galaxy and holding it together.”

The vicinity of the Tucana II ultra-faint dwarf galaxy, as imaged with the SkyMapper Telescope.

Anirudh Chiti, MIT


Scientists also found that these far-flung stars are older than the stars at Tucana II’s core — the first evidence of such an imbalance in this type of galaxy. Their discovery points to the possibility that the galaxy could be the product of one of the first mergers between two galaxies in the universe, which scientists refer to as “galactic cannibalism.” 

“We may be seeing the first signature of galactic cannibalism,” said MIT Professor Anna Frebel. “One galaxy may have eaten one of its slightly smaller, more primitive neighbors, that then spilled all its stars into the outskirts.”

Using a telescope’s imaging filter, astronomers are able to study the metal content of a galaxy’s stars to determine just how primitive it is. They had previously found stars at Tucana II’s core with such low metal content that the galaxy was identified as the most chemically primitive of the known ultrafaint dwarf galaxies.

New research found the outer stars were three times more metal-poor than the ones at the center, making them even more primitive. 

“This probably also means that the earliest galaxies formed in much larger dark matter halos than previously thought,” Frebel said. “We have thought that the first galaxies were the tiniest, wimpiest galaxies. But they actually may have been several times larger than we thought, and not so tiny after all.”

An early galactic merger is one likely explanation for the imbalance. Galactic cannibalism occurs “constantly” across today’s universe, according to MIT News, but mergers in the early universe are not so certain. 

“Tucana II will eventually be eaten by the Milky Way, no mercy,” Frebel said. “And it turns out this ancient galaxy may have its own cannibalistic history.”

The team hopes to use their approach to discover even older, more distant stars in other ultrafaint dwarf galaxies. 

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Dissecting the Anatomy of Planetary Nebulae Using the Hubble Space Telescope

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On the left is an image of the Jewel Bug Nebula (NGC 7027) captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2019 and released in 2020. Further analysis by researchers produced the RGB image on the right, which shows extinction due to dust, as inferred from the relative strength of two hydrogen emission lines, as red; emission from sulfur, relative to hydrogen, as green; and emission from iron as blue. Credit: STScI, Alyssa Pagan

Images of two iconic planetary nebulae taken by the Hubble Space Telescope are revealing new information about how they develop their dramatic features. Researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology and Green Bank Observatory presented new findings about the Butterfly Nebula (NGC 6302) and the Jewel Bug Nebula (NGC 7027) at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Friday, January 15, 2021.

Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 observed the nebulae in 2019 and early 2020 using its full, panchromatic capabilities, and the astronomers involved in the project have been using emission line images from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared light to learn more about their properties. The studies were first-of-their-kind panchromatic imaging surveys designed to understand the formation process and test models of binary-star-driven planetary nebula shaping.

“We’re dissecting them,” said Joel Kastner, a professor in RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science and School of Physics and Astronomy. “We’re able to see the effect of the dying central star in how it’s shedding and shredding its ejected material. We’re now seeing where material that the central star has tossed away is being dominated by ionized gas, where it’s dominated by cooler dust, and even how the hot gas is being ionized, whether by the star’s UV or by collisions caused by its present, fast winds.”

On top is an image of the Butterfly Nebula (NGC 6302) captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2019 and released in 2020. Further analysis by researchers produced the RGB image on the bottom, which shows extinction due to dust, as inferred from the relative strength of two hydrogen emission lines, as red; emission from nitrogen, relative to hydrogen, as green; and emission from iron as blue. Credit: STScI, APOD/J. Schmidt; J. Kastner (RIT) et al.

Kastner said analysis of the new HST images of the Butterfly Nebula is confirming that the nebula was ejected only about 2,000 years ago—an eyeblink by the standards of astronomy – and established that the S-shaped iron emission that helps give it the “wings” of gas is even younger. Surprisingly, they found that while astronomers previously believed they had located the nebula’s central star, that previously-identified star is actually not associated with the nebula and is instead much closer to Earth than the Butterfly Nebula. Kastner said he hopes that future studies with the James Webb Space Telescope could help locate the real dying star at the heart of the nebula.

The team’s ongoing analysis of the Jewel Bug Nebula is built on a 25-year baseline of measurements dating back to early Hubble imaging. Paula Moraga Baez, an astrophysical sciences and technology Ph.D. student from DeKalb, Ill., called the nebula “remarkable for its unusual juxtaposition of circularly symmetric, axisymmetric, and point-symmetric (bipolar) structures.” Moraga noted, “The nebula also retains large masses of molecular gas and dust despite harboring a hot central star and displaying high excitation states.”

The RGB image on the right reveals the spatial separation of molecules CO+ (red) and HCO+ (blue), indicative of UV and X-ray processes, respectively. The much deeper optical image of [O III] (green) provides a juxtaposition of the ionized atomic structure and that of radio molecular observations. Credit: STScI, Alyssa Pagan; J. Bublitz (NRAO/GBO) et al.

Jesse Bublitz ’20 Ph.D. (astrophysical sciences and technology), now a postdoctoral researcher at Green Bank Observatory, has extended the team’s analysis of NGC 7027 with radio images from the Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA) Telescope, from which he has identified molecular tracers of how impinging ultraviolet and X-ray light continues to alter the chemistry of the nebula. The combined observations from telescopes at other wavelengths, like Hubble, and bright molecules CO+ and HCO+ from NOEMA indicate how different regions of NGC 7027 are affected by the high-energy radiation from its central star.

“We’re very excited about these findings,” said Bublitz. “We had hoped to find structure that clearly showed CO+ and HCO+ spatially coincident or entirely in distinctive regions, which we did. This is the first map of NGC 7027, or any planetary nebula, in the molecule CO+, and only the second CO+ map of any astronomical source.”

Meeting: 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society

In addition to Kastner, Moraga, and Bublitz, the research team involved in the HST imaging work includes Rodolfo Montez Jr. ’10 Ph.D. (astrophysical sciences and technology) from Harvard-Smithsonian CfA; Bruce Balick from University of Washington; as well as Adam Frank and Eric Blackman from University of Rochester. Bublitz’s international team of collaborators on radio molecular line imaging of NGC 7027 includes Kastner, Montez Jr., and astrophysicists from Spain, France, and Brazil.



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Building Earth’s largest telescope on the far side of the moon

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NASA engineers are studying the feasibility of building a massive, kilometre-wide radio telescope on the moon that would dwarf anything we could build on Earth.

The telescope, which would be constructed by robots, would take the form of a huge, wire-mesh antenna in a dish shape that would hang suspended in a three-kilometre-wide crater on the far side of the moon. 

The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope would provide a unique perspective on the early universe, though it likely won’t be built for decades, according to NASA robotics engineer Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, who is leading the project.

“We all want to know what happened. How did the universe evolve? What happened after the Big Bang?” Bandyopadhyay told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald.

In the 14 billion years since that event, the light waves from that era have been stretched out from tiny fractions of a millimetre to more than 10 metres as the universe expanded. They’re now extremely long radio waves, and those can’t be seen on Earth “because the ionosphere absorbs it,” said Bandyopadhyay.

“So we want to go somewhere away from [Earth] so that we can get a picture of the Big Bang and evolution of the universe.”  

Telescope size presents challenges

The problem, however, is that in order to capture those wavelengths, not only does this telescope need to be on the moon, it needs to be very large, which makes it hard to build.

There are giant radio telescopes on Earth, which observe shorter radio wavelengths that do penetrate the atmosphere. The 300-metre-wide Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico — recently demolished in a catastrophic accident — or the 500-metre-wide FAST telescope in China represent significant engineering challenges.

Deployment of the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope would be done by robotic rovers, that would unfold the massive aluminum-mesh antenna. (Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay)

Standalone, self-supporting, dish-shaped radio telescopes can only get to a certain size, based on the strength of the materials they’re made from and the need to resist wind loads. To avoid these issues, the largest radio telescopes are built into natural features in the terrain. Arecibo and FAST, for example, were built in natural, dish-shaped sinkholes. 

Building such a telescope on the moon is, in one sense, easier. The lower gravity on the moon means a larger structure can be built with lighter materials. No atmosphere means no windstorms or other earthly environmental risks, though there are challenges from the moon’s harsh temperatures.  

According to Bandyopadhyay, the moon also has no shortage of appropriately shaped terrain structures in the form of ubiquitous impact craters. 

“These craters seem like natural places to put this dish-shaped telescope because the crater also looks like a bowl.”  

To find a crater candidate, Bandyopadhyay and his team combed over detailed pictures taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and discovered more than 80,000 suitable craters on the far side of the moon.

Origami-inspired transport and construction 

While the location would provide advantages, there are unique and significant challenges to building on the moon, in particular the harsh working conditions and the difficulty of transporting materials.  

The team studied a range of scenarios for how a telescope might be constructed and transported to the moon. The one they have arrived at is inspired by Japanese paper folding, said Bandyopadhyay.

“Origami is the art of folding paper into smaller and more interesting designs. But in space, origami is extensively used to take these large structures, like a large dish of one kilometre, and we can literally fold it multiple times and make it into a pretty small structure.”

The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope would be sensitive to frequencies that are blocked by Earth’s ionosphere, and would also be shielded from radio noise from Earth broadcasts. (Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay)

The antenna would be built on Earth in the form of a large, but extremely lightweight net-like structure made of conductive aluminum wire. It would be carefully folded into a package that would fit inside the nose cone of a large rocket, possibly the Space Launch System that NASA is currently developing.

Once launched, the antenna would be carried to the moon and land on the floor of the crater into which it would be installed. Then it would need to be deployed.  

“We will have these robots that will go down … to the lander and then pull lift wires that will connect to the lander sitting at the crater floor,” Bandyopadhyay said.

These lift wires would be anchored on the crater rim and as they are winched up, the antenna would unfold and deploy. Ultimately the net-like antenna would be suspended over the crater floor, looking a little like a dish-shaped spider web.  

The tension in the wires would be adjusted to result in the appropriate dish shape to receive radio signals from space and reflect them to a receiver.

All of this technology (the launch rocket possibly excepted) is available today, said Bandyopadhyay.  

The robots, for example, are currently being tested at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  

“These robots are called DuAxel, and they are actively being built at JPL for over a decade now. And these robots have the speciality that they can go down almost steep terrain like just cliff faces.”

For now, this is an early stage engineering feasibility study, rather than a fully developed mission proposal, but Bandyopadhyay suggests it would certainly be expensive and would be a very high-profile endeavour for NASA.  

“Cost is a big uncertainty right now. Right now, all I can say is we think this will be a flagship-class mission.”

Given that, it’s likely decades away, at least. 

“Space is hard,” said Bandyopadhyay. “I would be surprised if I could see this launched and deployed before I retired, and I’m a young scientist.”

Written and produced by Jim Lebans

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Hubble Space Telescope snaps stunning view of ethereal ‘Lost Galaxy’

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured this sharp view of NGC 4535, nicknamed the “Lost Galaxy.”


ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team

There are a lot of gorgeous galaxies out there in the universe, but it’s hard to top a truly sublime spiral, the kind of galaxy that swirls sparkling curved arms across the dark of space. That’s what’s on show in a new Hubble Space Telescope portrait of galaxy NGC 4535.

NGC 4535 has an engaging nickname: the Lost Galaxy. It’s not actually lost in space, but the moniker comes from how it looks with gear that’s not as fancy as Hubble.

“Despite the incredible quality of this image, taken from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 4535 has a hazy, somewhat ghostly, appearance when viewed from a smaller telescope,” the European Space Agency said in a statement Friday.

According to ESA, amateur astronomer Leland S. Copeland viewed the galaxy in the 1950s and gave it the whimsical Lost Galaxy nickname in honor of its ethereal appearance.  

NASA unveils 30 dazzling new Hubble space images for an epic anniversary


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NASA also shared the image this week. NASA and ESA jointly operate Hubble. The space telescope’s image shows a stunning amount of detail. The bright blue spots are where young, hot stars hang out. The lighter colors closer to the middle highlight older and cooler stars. 

The Lost Galaxy view is part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS, or PHANGS, survey, which includes a collection of data on star formation. The galaxy resides in the constellation Virgo at a distance of 50 million light-years from Earth, but Hubble makes it feel like it’s close to home.

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