China is hatching a plan to find Earth 2.0

A satellite will scour the Milky Way for exoplanets orbiting stars just like the Sun.

China is planning its first space mission to survey the skies for exoplanets similar to Kepler-186f, an Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star (artist’s impression). Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Webb Completes First Multi-Instrument Alignment

The sixth stage of aligning NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s mirrors to its scientific instruments so they will create the most accurate and focused images possible has concluded. While the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) continues its cooldown, optics teams have successfully aligned the rest of the observatory’s onboard instruments to Webb’s mirrors. Previous alignment efforts were so accurate that the team concluded no additional adjustments to the secondary mirror are necessary until the seventh and final stage, which will involve MIRI when it has fully cooled.

Extremely strong foundations

Construction on the world’s biggest eye on the sky, ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is making progress! After a significant slow-down of the building works due to the COVID-19 pandemic — including almost a year of complete site closure — works resumed in mid-2021. As this image from January 2022 shows, the foundations of the mammoth 39-m telescope have been laid, taking us one step closer to uncovering some of the most elusive mysteries of the Universe.

Credit: G. Hüdepohl (atacamaphoto.com)/ESO

James Webb Space Telescope Poster

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

World’s Most Powerful Digital Camera Sees Construction Green Light

The Department of Energy has approved the start of construction for a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera – the world’s largest – at the heart of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Assembled at the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the camera will be the eye of LSST, revealing unprecedented details of the universe and helping unravel some of its greatest mysteries.

This exploded view of the LSST’s digital camera highlights its various components, including lenses, shutter and filters

The Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) Project

FAST 3-D model. Source: arXiv

Astronomers envision a ‘High-Definition Hubble’ to look for life beyond Earth

Over the past two decades, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other powerful observatories have collectively made extraordinary breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe: from black holes, to dark energy, to extrasolar planets, and cosmic evolution.

A direct, to-scale, comparison between the primary mirrors of the Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, and the proposed High Definition Space Telescope (HDST). In this concept, the HDST primary is composed of 36 1.7 meter segments. Smaller segments could also be used. An 11 meter class aperture could be made from 54 1.3 meters segments.