The news was exciting; The James Webb Space Telescope has finally launched.
The NASA scientists have been working on this project for over a decade, and it took a budget
of more than $10 billion.
But if you think they’re going to get some rest and have a cup of coffee, you’re wrong.
LUVOIR Telescope project was started in 2013!
That means before they even launched James Webb, they began to look for a successor!
The launch date is in the mid of the next decade or, to be precise: 2040!
LUVOIR is a new scientific perspective that is a competent observer and would reside at
the L2 point, the second Lagrange point of Earth-sun.
It is capable of observing the Near-infrared wavelength of light.
But what does that all mean?
Keep watching.
Allow us to show you – the LUVOIR Telescope - The James Webb Space Telescope Successor.
. The architecture of the LUVOIR Telescope
The NASA team finalized two possible designs for LUVOIR Telescope.
The first is a 15-meter mirror covered flat that uses SLS or the space launch system.
The second design is an 8-meter mirror that will launch on a heavy lifter like Falcon.
To give you a vision of the size of this telescope, you should know that the 15-meter mirror is
50% bigger than the giant Earth-based telescope!
The estimated cost of this project is $18 billion to $24 billion for the LUVOIR A, which
is the first version with a 15-meter-diameter mirror.
And $12 B to $18 B for LUVOIR B, the second version with the 8-meter-diameter mirror.
All these efforts and costs will be used for a 5-year mission in space.
Either version of LUVOIR presents NASA with a hefty bill, but team members point out that
it’s comparable to what the Hubble Space Telescope cost over its lifetime.
The difference in capability between the 15.1-meter LUVOIR-A and the eight-meter LUVOIR-B roughly
matches their difference in size.
While LUVOIR-A could identify 54 “habitable planet candidates,” LUVOIR-B would get 28.
The LUVOIR team also focused on a variety of astrophysics subfields.
The scientist had to design the telescope as flexible as possible to help the movement
of instruments.
The mission team also designed many sample science projects spanning the scale of the
universe to find the best design for all the purposes of the mission.
The notion of sending up LUVOIR-A in pieces, to be assembled later in space, has been presented
to the Decadal Survey.
However, the panel traditionally makes recommendations based on science return rather than how a
project should be executed.
With in-space assembly, NASA could, in theory, put together a mirror more giant—may be
much more significant—than 15 meters.
Back in the mid-2010s, then-NASA science chief (and three-time Hubble repairman) John Grunsfeld
proposed that astronauts working in deep space could reasonably do the job.
NASA commissioned a study of the in-space assembly of large observatories in 2018.
Still, the conclusion was that Grunsfeld’s astronaut construction crew wasn’t feasible
now and that robotic assembly would be better.
The probable missions of the telescope:
NASA’s primary concern in the future.
Will the scientists find an answer to their question?
What is the future technology?
One of the most researches is called Large Ultraviolet, Optical, and InfraRed Surveyor
or LUVOIR.
What makes LUVOIR so unique is its capability to answer scientists’ (or even our) biggest
questions: is there life out there?
Is it possible to inhabit any place nearby?
And by nearby, we don’t mean only the neighbors of the Earth but tens or even hundreds of
planets.
Does humanity have a future home on some other planets?
Well, they call LUVOIR a telescope that can find the second Earth.
LUVOIR helps us to not only find these answers but also realize the details.
We can measure the fraction covered in continents vs. oceans.
We can find the properties of clouds on those planets.
We can get even more precisely the claimant changes due to the changing of the seasons.
Although Hubble was a huge help to find some fundamental answers, there are more questions
left, like the materials that atmospheres are made out of.
LUVOIR would detect the structure and composition of other planets’ atmospheres.
Maybe even trying to find any evidence of oxygen, nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide,
or even complex molecules.
LUVOIR’s team believes that if 28 rocky planets have an atmosphere but no life on
it, they can conclude that less than 10% of worlds with the same size and orbital characteristics
as Earth contain life.
Jason Tumlinson is a NASA scientist working on LUVOIR.
He answered the question about the possibility of existing life out there: “it could explore
dozens or Earth-like planets and assay their atmospheres.
Detecting an exoplanet showing signs of life would be a discovery on the level of Newton,
Einstein, Darwin, quantum mechanics, Hubble’s expansion - you name it.
LUVOIR is the first telescope designed from the beginning for this revolutionary purpose.”
What would be the next steps after finding out those other planets?
Scientists will face the tricky part: understanding the rules that life follows.
The meaning of life on alien planets is different from our perception.
One of the primary purposes of the LUVOIR project, or in general, any human effort,
is to understand life better and on a larger scale.
Although this mission is huge and will turn human life into a game world, finding life
out there is not the only purpose of this gigantic super-advanced telescope.
Some other cool facts about LUVOIR are that we finally can see what Hubble, Webb, and
Roman were not sure about.
LUVOIR will reveal smaller, fainter galaxies in more significant numbers and at greater
distances than any other observatory or objects a whopping 40 times lighter than we can presently
see.
It will take images of the outer planets as good as those that were taken by Voyager 1
and 2.
So with LUVOIR, we can do so any time we choose; there is no need to be present there.
As described in the study report, the observatory's foremost goal is to supercharge the hunt for
small, faint, Earth-like exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars in the hope that some of these
might be able to harbor life.
A telescope has directly imaged no world of that size and type, and doing so will require
a considerable light-collecting “bucket” placed beyond Earth’s obscuring atmosphere.
The LUVOIR is not only going to be our eye in this galaxy but also is going to help us
find out about ANY other galaxy in the universe!
When we talked about LUVOIR’s power to observe, we spoke about LUVOIR’s ability to show
a galaxy with the size of the Milky Way.
To realize how significant this achievement is, consider if Hubble were imaged that same
galaxy with the same amount of time, it would contain only 0.06% of the information presented
in a LUVOIR image, with notably low resolution and light-gathering power.
“When you compare the planet brightness in two wavelengths, you get a color.
That’s basically how your eye works,” says Aki Roberge, LUVOIR study scientist and
an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“So when we say we’ll measure the colors of planets, we do mean the reflected blue,
green, red that you could see with your eyes.
In addition, we’ll measure colors outside of the range of light your eye can see.”
The advantages of being a successor LUVOIR is a successor to James Webb, a very
costly and, of course, well-promised telescope.
This will give the LUVOIR’s team a list of recommendations that will help them to
keep their project flowless.
They can observe the weak points and possible outcomes and avoid some.
Why some?
Because although the project is in the hands of the best scientists in the team, they have
to be responsive to NASA’s central policies.
The LUVOIR study group, made up of more than 100 scientists and engineers, has strong ties
with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.
A small team from Goddard, led by study scientist Roberge and deputy Domagal-Goldman, was supported
by another two dozen “voting members” and a larger group of volunteers worldwide.
From objects within our Solar System to exoplanets, stars, galaxies, and the most significant
cosmic structures of all, LUVOIR would answer the biggest questions we have about our universe.
All we have to do to make our dreams of knowing what’s out there in the universe come true
is choose to build it.
But now it’s your turn to tell us your vision about the facts that the LUVOIR telescope
will reveal to us.
Do you believe in life on other planets?
Will LUVOIR help to end all the discussions and disagreements about the existence of aliens?
Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to subscribe to our channel to stay updated
about the news from the space.
We’ll see you in the next one!