University of Colorado Boulder astronomers have proposed a new observatory that will capture images with a resolution better than that of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The new orbiting observatory will be capable of capturing photographs up to 1,000 times more detailed than those seen by astronomers using the HST, launched in 1990.
The Aragoscope would consist of a telescope placed behind an opaque disk, with a diameter of half a mile. The disc will be constructed of a dark plastic-like material, and unfurled in space. Light from a distant target would pass around the disk, forming a diffracted image that would be focused at a central point. Light will then pass into the telescope, which would resolve the photons into a high-resolution image.
The CU Aragoscope is designed to be lighter than current technologies, allowing observatories to launch into space at a lower cost than is possible today. The James Webb Telescope, scheduled for launch in October 2018, is NASA's planned successor to the aging Hubble observatory. However, that system is far heavier than the planned Aragoscope, which could represent a new means of designing space telescopes.
"The lighter it is, the more you can launch into space; with the bigger structure, with the bigger telescope, you can get much higher resolution. We've reached as far as we can go with the kind of traditional way of doing them. We need a new way of doing something revolutionary with bigger and bigger telescopes. The Aragoscope is sort of the next step, the new way of doing things," Anthony Harness, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado, said.
So far, the project has been funded by a $100,000 grant from NASA, and researchers are now seeking an additional $500,000 through the Innovative Advanced Concepts program, managed by NASA. This program is aimed at developing technologies which will turn science fiction into real-life science. In June 2014, the space agency selected 12 projects, including the proposed space telescope, for a first round of funding. Six of the 12 first-round winners will be named in the next round for additional funds.
The system is named after Dominique François Jean Arago, a French physicist and mathematician who did his work in the early 19th Century. It was François Arago who first identified diffracted light waves bending around a disk.
This proposed observatory would be able to capture images of the event horizon of black holes - the boundary beyond which almost nothing can return. Unlike most telescopes, the Aragoscope could also look back down on Earth, seeing objects as small as a house cat.
