Sentences with word «starshade»

In fact, in the basement of Princeton's sprawling Frick Chemistry Laboratory, Kasdin is already working on a test bed: a meter - wide, 75 - meter - long tube with a camera at one end, a laser at the other and a scaled - down starshade in between.

As such, an official starshade mission does not exist.

Before Cash became entangled with starshades, the 63 - year - old scientist had a productive career designing equipment for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, the XMM - Newton observatory and other big - ticket astronomy missions.

Cash and Anthony Harness hoped to take starshades into the realm of astronomy in a trial planned for Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats — famous for its dark skies and flat, open terrain ringed with mountains.

But Seager emphasizes the importance of the analysis, which established scientific goals for the mission, compiled a tentative list of target stars and evaluated starshade designs and implementation strategies in space.

Four parts of a prototype starshade are being built and will soon undergo testing.

They placed small (1 to 2 feet wide) starshades midway between a telescope mounted on a tripod and five light sources (LEDs) lined up 2 kilometers away.

Anthony Harness, Cash's graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, puts together a miniature starshade for testing.

Alpha Centauri or Bust Cash dubs a particularly ambitious starshade experiment the «Mission to Alpha Centauri,» which aims to get unprecedented looks at Earth's nearest star system, just 4.3 light - years away.

Cash has also been authorized by NASA to launch several starshade - bearing rockets out of the Mojave Desert.

The plan she is working on calls for a two - part instrument, a space telescope and an «external occulter,» a movable starshade that flies in front of the telescope to block out the starlight and bring the planet into view.

Because starshades work with practically any telescope, one on WFIRST could cast a deeper shadow and see fainter planets than a coronagraph.

And at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, researchers are demonstrating how to fabricate a larger - scale starshade's delicate petals, fold the entire structure up inside a rocket, and deploy and unfurl it to the size of a baseball diamond.

Meanwhile aerospace company Northrop Grumman has tested miniaturized starshades at a dry lake bed in Nevada and at a giant solar telescope in Arizona.

Researchers at the McMath - Pierce Solar Telescope in Arizona test a 4 - inch starshade, designed to precisely block out a star's light, but not the light of orbiting planets.

Dubbed Starshade, the occulter (essentially a big flying disc) would fly between the James Webb Space Telescope and the star that it's observing, blocking large amounts of light from bright stars that aren't being observed.

Today I will present the status of technology development directed towards internal occulters (aka coronagraphs) and external occulters (aka starshades), along with a look forward.

Although starshades are not part of the HDST baseline mission, they provide a vital alternative architecture, and could be employed in a second phase of the mission to enable more detailed characterization of interesting planetary systems.

At the centerpiece of this mission would be a 30 - meter - diameter starshade, working in tandem with a 1.1 - meter telescope to look for, and investigate, exoplanets.

Undeterred, Cash and Harness are now pursuing a loftier strategy: suspending a starshade from a high - altitude balloon and observing from an airplane (with a telescope strapped to its wing) that flies in the starshade's shadow.

«The starshade, so far as I know, is the only viable, affordable technology that shows, at least on paper, that we can get this kind of look at other Earths.»

Either way, the starshade would use thrusters to maneuver to a spot, about 50,000 kilometers from the telescope, from which it could screen out the star.

Or, if he's truly lucky, maybe that light will be blocked by a starshade instead.

After examining a planetary system, the telescope would turn to the next target, with the starshade flying to a new, strategically chosen locale — a feat that would require exquisite, though technologically plausible, coordination between the two spacecraft.

To Observe New Worlds Later in 2005, NIAC funded a two - year architecture study of the starshade concept by the University of Colorado, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems and Princeton University.

In recent months, the agency's attitude has begun to change, and there's a good chance an upcoming orbital observatory will be equipped with a starshade accessory.

After planting a starshade atop a small mountain, they would have mounted a telescope in a truckbed and waited for the star to duck behind the shade.

A starshade blocks the light from a distant star in this illustration, revealing several exoplanets.

Until a starshade makes it into outer space, researchers will have to settle for experiments closer to home.

While it may still happen in the future, Cash has found another alternative: Northrop Grumman's Steven Warwick and Harness have been using the McMath Solar Observatory on Arizona's Kitt Peak to create a non-moving image of a star, and have placed a starshade in that beam.

With NASA possibly including a starshade in the upcoming Wide - Field Infrared Survey Telescope mission, Cash is pleased that he might see a NASA - sanctioned starshade mission take flight within a decade or so, «while I'm still in my 70s, rather than in my 80s or beyond.»

With the help of a starshade, they could see a «planet» 100 million times fainter than the pseudostar.

But rather than receiving money, he gets «in - kind support,» with the company providing the lab resources — including engineering analyses and tests — needed to turn the starshade idea into reality.

The original plan was to hang a starshade from a 246 - foot - long zeppelin stored at the NASA Ames Research Center in California.

Cash did a great job conceptualizing his starshade mission a decade ago, Falker says, «but he didn't get any opportunity for follow - on development, which was frustrating.»

«We have to show the world that the starshade is part of the astronomer's toolkit,» she says.

«Web is the first, so far as I know, to turn the starshade into a practical idea by showing that it could be smaller, lighter and therefore much more feasible,» says NIAC head Jay Falker.

NIAC's Falker has long been disappointed by NASA's tepid backing of the starshade, especially given the priority the agency has attached to exoplanet surveys.

Cash and his team tested different variations of his starshade design in the Nevada desert; the best designs might one day fly in space to help astronomers detect and study exoplanets.

The starshade entered the mainstream in 2013 when NASA commissioned a study, chaired by MIT's Sara Seager, of a hypothetical, billion - dollar mission called Exo - S (a contraction of Exoplanet - Starshade).

The resulting plan called for two spacecraft — the starshade and an orbital telescope — to launch together and detach in space, or to go up separately.

Instead Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division, says the agency is «in a «don't preclude a starshade» mode.»

A device called a starshade might offer a shortcut.

So far not precluding a starshade closely resembles a concerted effort to build one: when NASA first announced the formal start of WFIRST, it also confirmed that the telescope would be launched into an orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, where conditions are tranquil enough for a starshade to function.

Not all the obstacles to a starshade are technological.

A starshade is a sunflower - shaped, paper - thin screen half as big as a football field that would float tens of thousands of kilometers directly ahead of WFIRST, blocking out a target star's light in much the same way one might blot out the sun in the sky with an extended thumb.

Despite WFIRST being nearly a decade away from launch, the decision to move forward with preparations for a starshade rendezvous must come soon because WFIRST must receive minor modifications to allow it to sync up with a starshade across tens of thousands of kilometers of empty space.

In addition, the agency recently formed the StarShade Readiness Working Group and officially designated the starshade as a «technology development activity» — moves that could accelerate the agency's progress.