NASA builds the world's most powerful telescope

In 2018 James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of NASA will fly into space to explore the universe. However, NASA did not stop there but began to set out a long-term space exploration plan in hopes of discovering alien life.

The US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has just announced that it will discover aliens in the next 20 years. To achieve this ambition, NASA is working on building the latest high-tech aperture space telescope (Atlast) . This is NASA's research idea based on the Hubble telescope's key technology and JWST to answer questions in its 30-year vision.

Scientists and engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland are currently studying the technical and scientific requirements and costs involved in building the Atlast telescope . Atlast will leverage the pioneering technological advances of JWST telescopes, such as large segmented mirror series. It will take the responsibility of the Hubble telescope.

Dr. Clampin said one of the applications currently planned for Atlast is the ability to detect signs of Earth-like planets that exist in the vicinity of the sun. Compared to other telescopes, Atlast has the advanced ability to identify chemicals that can indicate life in distant worlds like Earth. Atlast's main main mirror will allow many other scientific studies to be conducted.

In addition to studying the formation of stars and galaxies, Atlast can analyze stars in galaxies more than 10 million light-years from Earth and the region of star-forming 325 light-years in anywhere. Which in the universe.

To achieve the best performance, the Atlast Observatory will operate on Sun-Earth (L2) orbit, about 1.5 million km from the Earth, outside the orbit of the Moon, along with the orbit chosen for JWST .

The most important thing is that Atlast will have to carry a huge main mirror - even bigger than JWST, which will be the largest segmented mirror ever used by NASA and has a larger light-gathering surface than the others. other telescope.

Atlast is seventeen times more likely to focus light than the Hubble telescope. It will achieve the important scientific goals that terrestrial observatories cannot perform or with any future space mission.