(ORDO NEWS) — Launched into space in December last year, the James Webb Space Telescope has not yet fully configured all scientific equipment, and engineers and scientists are already thinking about its successor. What will the new space telescope look like?
The experiment, which should be carried out on board the International Space Station (ISS) by the participants of the Axiom-1 flight, will allow us to evaluate the possibilities of building a space telescope that uses a liquid mirror.
Strange as it may sound, the behavior of fluids in space is so promising that it makes one think about building a telescope mirror that will be 10 or even 100 times the diameter of the segmented mirror of the James Webb telescope (its diameter is 6.5 meters).
In the conditions of microgravity of outer space, drops of water and other liquids acquire an almost ideal spherical shape.
“In microgravity, fluids take on shapes that can be used to create lenses and mirrors, so if we create them in space, we can use them to build huge telescopes,” said principal investigator Edward Balaban of NASA‘s Fluidic Telescope Experiment.
That’s just how to fix the liquid in space in the form needed by scientists? Researchers will still have to puzzle over this question, but the possibilities of telescopes with a liquid lens are almost limitless.
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