{"id":17733,"date":"2020-04-28T22:28:37","date_gmt":"2020-04-28T14:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/far-out-xplore-teams-up-with-jpl-and-aerospace-corp-on-gravity-lens-telescope\/"},"modified":"2020-04-28T22:28:37","modified_gmt":"2020-04-28T14:28:37","slug":"far-out-xplore-teams-up-with-jpl-and-aerospace-corp-on-gravity-lens-telescope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/far-out-xplore-teams-up-with-jpl-and-aerospace-corp-on-gravity-lens-telescope\/","title":{"rendered":"Far out! Xplore teams up with JPL and Aerospace Corp. on gravity-lens telescope"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An artist\u2019s conception shows Xplore\u2019s advanced solar sail for NASA\u2019s Solar Gravity Lens Focus mission. (Visualization by Bryan Versteeg, SpaceHabs.com \/ via Xplore)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA has awarded a $2 million grant to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, The Aerospace Corp. \u2014 and Xplore, a Seattle-based space venture \u2014 to develop the design architecture for a far-out telescope array that would use the sun\u2019s gravitational field as a lens to focus on alien planets.<\/p>\n

The Phase III award from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC, would cover two years of development work and could lead to the launch of a technology demonstration mission in the 2023-2024 time frame.<\/p>\n

Xplore\u2019s team will play a key role in designing the demonstration mission\u2019s spacecraft, which would be launched as a rideshare payload and propelled by a deployable solar sail.<\/p>\n

The partners in the Solar Gravity Lens Focus mission settled on solar sails as the best way to get the array\u2019s imaging spacecraft out to the jaw-dropping distance of 547 AU (50 billion miles, or 80 billion kilometers) on a reasonable time scale.<\/p>\n

Solar sails on spacecraft are pushed by the pressure of photons from the sun, just as the sails on sailboats are pushed by the wind. The technology was most recently tested on the Planetary Society\u2019s Lightsail 2 experiment (with debatable results).<\/p>\n

The demonstration mission is meant to show that the constant push from solar radiation could drive a spacecraft to speeds of about 25 to 40 kilometers per second (15 to 25 miles per second, or 5 to 8 AU per year). That would be two to three times as fast as NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 interstellar probe. Such a probe could zoom past Jupiter in less than a year.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s just the start. If the demonstration mission is successful, NASA would have to decide whether to go ahead with the full Solar Gravity Lens Focus telescope array a decade later. The array would be composed of swarms of small spacecraft, each one with a bigger solar sail that could achieve speeds of more than 100 kilometers per second (more than 62 miles per second, or 20 AU per year). That\u2019s what it would take to get the probes out to their observation point within 25 to 30 years.<\/p>\n

From that vantage point, the array of spacecraft would capture light rays that have been focused by the sun\u2019s gravitational field, in accordance with general relativity.<\/p>\n