Scientists Designing a 'Space Railroad'

Oct. 21, 2004 — -- A next-generation space telescope is being designed with a set of eyes that can roll around the cosmos on their own private railroad.

Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., are working on a proposed orbiting observatory made up of two powerful telescopes that will analyze space in ultraviolet light. Two eyes are better than one, the lead scientists explain, especially if they're linked by a railroad-like beam.

The twin telescopes will use the 120-foot track to zoom back and forth, absorb images and cover the depth and scope of a giant telescope more than twice their individual size.

"By moving your telescopes to many different separations and angles, you can build an image that has much greater detail and overall view," explained David Leisawitz, principle investigator for the Space Infrared Interferometric Telescope at Goddard. "But, unlike launching a single large telescope, you don't need a giant rocket to get it to space."

SPIRIT is one of nine proposals under consideration for NASA's Origins program, which seeks to find fundamental answers about the universe and its formation. The project also represents one of two recent efforts to take a technology that's usually limited to Earth-bound applications and use it in space.

Interferometry was invented in the late 1800s by Albert Michelson, who discovered that by measuring the difference in readings from two or more separate telescopes, he could calculate data that reflected the space between the instruments. A number of ground-based telescopes use the principle today, including the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which detects visible and the longer infrared light from space, and the Very Long Baseline Array, whose 10 radio antennas are sprawled across the United States and its territories from St. Croix to the Virgin Islands to Hawaii.

SPIRIT won't have nearly the range of its ground-based counterparts, but it would have a key advantage of being in space and being mobile. The twin telescopes will move along the beams like railroad cars and combine their images to achieve the resolving power of a telescope 120 feet across.