Star Shade
There were so many fun and intriguing things that we saw while we visited the JPL NASA. The one thing that really stood out to me while we were at NASA was their interest in finding other earthily planets in other solar systems. We talked to Brenden Crill about this project that he is currently working on. It hasn't yet been approved by NASA to be sent into space, they are in the preliminary stages of finding ways it could work so that they can get the idea approved.
From Brenden Crill's talk we learned that there are over 3500 other planets that are just outside of our solar system, there is about 1 planet for every star. In this project they are trying to find another planet with the same properties as earth. To do this they send telescopes up into space to take pictures near other stars to search for other planets. Because the planets are so close to the stars when the telescopes take the photographs it is nearly impossible to see them. There is so much light flooding the photograph and creating these sun flares that we often see in our own photographs from our sun. This issue has lead to the idea of the star shade.
The star shade is a giant flower external ocular structure. The star shade they want to make will be 34 meters in diameter. The idea behind this is to send out the star shade along with a space telescope to try and capture an image of another planet. To do this they would have to deploy the star shade from the space telescope and then drive the telescope about three earths diameters away from the star shade so that it will cast a shadow so the planets will then be bright enough to show up in the photographs that the telescope will take.
The shape of the star shade is very deliberate to bounce and bend the light from the star. Their idea is to use starlight suppression technology with the petals coming off of the star shade. These petals will bend the photons of light around so that it will create this corona around the petals thus creating an eclipse of that specific star. When that happens there should be enough light blocked out by the artificial eclipse that the light from a planet will be bright enough to show up on a photograph.
They have made several different models trying to figure out the exact right way to get this devise made. They started with a small origami paper model trying to figure out how to get the petals to wrap around themselves so that the shade will fit into a space craft. The star shade while it is open is larger in diameter than any space craft that JPL currently has. They are also in the process of figuring out what material would be best to create the shade out of. They want to find a material that is light so they don't use as much gas to fly it around, but also they have to worry about the durability of the shade. What they are most worried about is over time micrometeorites in space will eventually put wholes through the shade which would then let light through ruining the shade in entirety. There are many more things that they are trying to figure out to make this idea into a reality.
From Brenden Crill's talk we learned that there are over 3500 other planets that are just outside of our solar system, there is about 1 planet for every star. In this project they are trying to find another planet with the same properties as earth. To do this they send telescopes up into space to take pictures near other stars to search for other planets. Because the planets are so close to the stars when the telescopes take the photographs it is nearly impossible to see them. There is so much light flooding the photograph and creating these sun flares that we often see in our own photographs from our sun. This issue has lead to the idea of the star shade.
The star shade is a giant flower external ocular structure. The star shade they want to make will be 34 meters in diameter. The idea behind this is to send out the star shade along with a space telescope to try and capture an image of another planet. To do this they would have to deploy the star shade from the space telescope and then drive the telescope about three earths diameters away from the star shade so that it will cast a shadow so the planets will then be bright enough to show up in the photographs that the telescope will take.
The shape of the star shade is very deliberate to bounce and bend the light from the star. Their idea is to use starlight suppression technology with the petals coming off of the star shade. These petals will bend the photons of light around so that it will create this corona around the petals thus creating an eclipse of that specific star. When that happens there should be enough light blocked out by the artificial eclipse that the light from a planet will be bright enough to show up on a photograph.
They have made several different models trying to figure out the exact right way to get this devise made. They started with a small origami paper model trying to figure out how to get the petals to wrap around themselves so that the shade will fit into a space craft. The star shade while it is open is larger in diameter than any space craft that JPL currently has. They are also in the process of figuring out what material would be best to create the shade out of. They want to find a material that is light so they don't use as much gas to fly it around, but also they have to worry about the durability of the shade. What they are most worried about is over time micrometeorites in space will eventually put wholes through the shade which would then let light through ruining the shade in entirety. There are many more things that they are trying to figure out to make this idea into a reality.
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