WORLD'S SMALLEST SPACE TELESCOPE

WORLD'S SMALLEST SPACE TELESCOPE

Placing a telescope in an orbit outside the Earth's atmosphere has enormous advantages. It can be active 24 hours a day, it isn't affected by the weather or light pollution, and the light it gathers isn't distorted by air turbulence. But it is also very, very expensive. Hubble Space Telescope cost 2.5 billion dollars to build, and even more to launch and maintain. The scientific output of Hubble cannot be measured in dollars, but the telescope has delivered unsurpassed amount of data, allowing us to enrich our understanding of the Universe more than any other single instrument.

Space telescopes, however, don't have to be big and expensive. Canadian scientists and engineers at University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, in collaboration with their partners in Austria and Poland are developing BRITE (BRIght Target Explorer) - a "constellation" of 6 nano-satellites that will perform astronomical observations at a tiny fraction of Hubble's cost. Each satellite is a 20-cm (8-inch) cube weighing around 7 kg (15 lbs). They are developed and built in as little as 2 years, using mostly off-the-shelf components.

The first two telescopes in the BRITE constellation, one built in Canada and the other in Austria, are going to be launched on February 25, 2013 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, together with 5 other satellites, thus further reducing the cost of sending them into space. BRITE will not be the first small telescope developed by Canadian scientists. A slightly bigger, 54-kg telescope MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) was launched in 2003 on a Russian rocket. It was nicknamed the "Humble Space Telescope" at the time.

The little telescopes, due to their size, cannot aspire to compete with Hubble in sensitivity or quality and amount of collected data. They will, however, provide valuable observations of bright and nearby stars. This niche is not covered by Hubble or other space telescopes since their time is better spent observing faint objects like remote galaxies and distant stars. The BRITE instruments will investigate subtle variations in the light of bright stars - a result of spots on their surface, a planet orbiting the star, or seismic reverberations in the star's interior. The quality of data from BRITE is expected to surpass that obtained by much larger telescopes on the ground.

- PZ

For more detailed information about BRITE go to:
http://phys.org/news/2013-02-world-smallest-space-telescope.html
http://www.brite-constellation.at/
http://www.utias-sfl.net/nanosatellites/CanX3/index.html

Photo Credit: Canadian Space Agency (CSA)