NASA’s enormous new James Webb House Telescope is essentially the most highly effective telescope ever launched into house, however the company is already trying towards the longer term. It’s presently exploring the potential for creating liquid lenses to make a huge telescope maybe 100 instances the scale of the Webb.
In a brand new article on its web site, NASA writes that it’s exploring new methods and fluid supplies to construct large telescopes.
“In the case of telescopes, larger is healthier,” the company writes. “Bigger telescopes acquire extra gentle and permit astronomers to see farther into house and see distant objects in higher element.
“What if there was a approach to make a telescope 10 instances – and even 100 instances – larger than earlier than? What began as a theoretical query is now a collection of experiments to see if fluids can be utilized to create lenses in microgravity.”
Experiments on Making Liquid Lenses in House
The experiments are presently being saved on the ISS U.S. Nationwide Labin the USA Orbital Phase (USOS) of the Worldwide House Station (ISS) as they await the arrival of the astronauts aboard Axiom Mission 1, a non-public crew mission that’s scheduled to ship 4 individuals to the ISS for an eight-day keep.
Personal Israeli astronaut Eytan Stibbe, Mission Specialist 2 on the crew, might be finishing up the experiments as a part of his analysis portfolio.
Whereas liquids could also be much less helpful as optical lenses in Earth’s gravity, they’re nice at focusing gentle in microgravity.
“All liquids have an elastic-like power that holds them collectively at their floor,” NASA says. “This power known as floor pressure. It’s what permits some bugs to glide throughout water with out sinking and provides water droplets their form. On Earth, when droplets of water are sufficiently small (2 mm or smaller), floor pressure overcomes gravity and so they stay completely spherical. If a droplet grows a lot bigger, it will get squished underneath its personal weight.
“However in house, blobs of water and different liquids (after wobbling about) finally assume an ideal spherical form.”
Stibbe’s experiments will discover whether or not it will likely be potential for high-precision lenses and mirrors to be made in house utilizing liquids.
“We thought, why not benefit from the best way liquids naturally behave in microgravity and apply it to the development of large-scale telescopes or space-manufactured optical elements that may have every kind of makes use of,” says Edward Balaban, principal investigator of the Fluidic Telescope Experiment (FLUTE) at NASA’s Ames Analysis Heart. “In microgravity, liquids tackle shapes which are helpful for making lenses and mirrors, so if we make them in house, they may very well be used to construct telescopes which are dramatically larger than was beforehand thought potential.”
Profitable Prior Checks on Earth
Researchers beforehand examined the concept of liquid lenses on Earth by simulating a weightless setting with water.
“By injecting a liquid that may be solidified, into round frames submerged in water, we had been in a position to create lenses actually in a janitor’s bucket,” Dr. Valeri Frumkin of Technion – Israel Institute of Know-how tells NASA. “Polymers, that are additionally utilized in nail salons to make acrylic nails or in adhesives like superglue, are a pure alternative for lens materials.
“The trick is to guarantee that the water has the very same density because the polymer we’re injecting in order that the forces of buoyancy exactly oppose gravitational forces to simulate the circumstances of weightlessness.”
The stable lenses created with liquid on this method had been discovered to have “excellent” floor high quality that rivals and even beats what might be created with the very best sprucing strategies that exist in optical lens manufacturing. What’s extra, they solely required a fraction of the time to create in comparison with conventional lenses.
“This technique permits us to utterly skip any mechanical processes corresponding to grinding or sprucing,” says Technion mechanical engineering professor Moran Bercovici. “The pure physics of fluids merely does all of the work for us.”
After profitable experiments on the bottom, the researchers additionally examined their experiment in simulated microgravity on ZeroG parabolic airplane flights. They efficiently however momentarily created liquid lenses of desired shapes earlier than the airplane stopped diving and gravity ruined the lenses.
Opening the Door to Large House Telescopes
When the experiment is finished in everlasting microgravity aboard the Worldwide House Station, Stibbe might be including an extra step to treatment the fluid right into a lens that holds its form. As soon as the lenses are created with liquid polymers and hardened with both UV gentle or temperature, they are going to be despatched again to Earth for evaluation by NASA researchers at Ames.
“We anticipate this method will create completely formed and clean surfaces: the very best surfaces to show into mirrors,” says FLUTE scientist Vivek Dwivedi at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart.
“If our station experiment is profitable, it will likely be the primary time an optical part is made in house,” says Balaban. “It feels a bit like making historical past.”
If all goes effectively, liquid transported on a number of missions to house may very well be mixed to create colossal house telescopes that would in any other case be too massive to launch from Earth.
The James Webb House Telescope is about to seize the highest-quality photos of house people have ever seen, however it might at some point be supplanted by “liquid lens” telescopes 100 instances as massive that seize house photographs we are able to solely dream of at present.
