NASA officials will get an update this week from University of Colorado Boulder researchers on a telescope being built that will provide images 1,000 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope, according to a press release from the University of Colorado Boulder.
The telescope would orbit with a half-mile wide opaque disk in front of it, according to Professor Webster Cash from the university's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. Diffracted light waves would bend around and meet at a central spot and the light would provide the telescope with high-resolutions images.
The telescope is named Aragoscope after French scientist Francois Arago who first detected diffracted light waves around a disk, according to the press release. Objects like black hole "event horizons" and interstellar plasma swaps could be detected, as well as images as small as a rabbit hopping around on the Earth's surface.
"Traditionally, space telescopes have essentially been monolithic pieces of glass like the Hubble Space Telescope," said CU-Boulder doctoral student Anthony Harness of the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. "But the heavier the space telescope, the more expensive the cost of the launch. We have found a way to solve that problem by putting large, lightweight optics into space that offer a much higher resolution and lower cost."
"The opaque disk of the Aragoscope works in a similar way to a basic lens," said Harness, who is working with Cash on the Aragoscope project. "The light diffracted around the edge of the circular disk travels the same path length to the center and comes into focus as an image."
The larger telescope diameter will provide higher image resolution, but Aragoscope is still lightweight, allowing it to be launched into space with ease.
