NEW YORK: Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California are looking to use glitter-like materials in future telescopes instead of solid glass to take images of new worlds.
Those who are aware about telescopes and the underlying mechanism should know that they use solid mirrors to image far-away objects. Large telescopes require complex mirrors, which are quite expensive and difficult to construct. Further because of their size and weight they add further challenges to constructing and launching a space telescope.
Researchers have devised a concept called Orbiting Rainbows that addresses these issues. They propose using clouds of reflective glitter-like particles in place of mirrors to enable a telescope to view stars and exoplanets. The technology would enable high-resolution imaging at a fraction of the cost.
“It’s a floating cloud that acts as a mirror,” said Marco Quadrelli from JPL, the Orbiting Rainbows principal investigator. “There is no backing structure, no steel around it, no hinges; just a cloud.”
In the proposed Orbiting Rainbows system, the small cloud of glitter-like grains would be trapped and manipulated with multiple laser beams. The trapping happens because of pressure from the laser light — specifically, the momentum of photons translates into two forces: one that pushes particles away, and another that pushes the particles toward the axis of the light beam. The pressure of the laser light coming from different directions shapes the cloud and pushes the small grains to align in the same direction. In a space telescope, the tenuous cloud would be formed by millions of grains, each possibly as small as fractions of a millimeter in diameter.
