Future of Engineering

Some 40 years ago, Russian scientists Nikolai Kardashev, Leonid Matveyenko, and Gennady Sholomitsky came up with the idea of a space interferometer. It is based on the phenomenon of interferometry - a capacity of different waves (sound, light, or radio waves) that have the same phase to add to each other, or subtract if the phase is opposite. If we position two or more telescopes far away from each other and start watching the same celestial object, the combination of their signals causes interference that may sharply enhance the resolution capacity of the whole system. It becomes as high as if the observations were conducted by a telescope with an antenna diameter equal to the distance between the telescopes.

This idea was first tested on Earth with the participation of the world's major radio observatories. It was like using a radio telescope close to the Earth's diameter in size. A decision was made to launch a radio telescope into space. Radical changes in the Soviet Union delayed the project's implementation by two decades.

Under the project, a 10 meter-long radiotelescope will be put into a high-elliptical orbit with an apogee of about 350,000 km (220,000 miles). Together with ground-based instruments, it is supposed to form a giant interferometer with a diameter almost equal to the distance between the Earth and the moon. Its angular resolution will be 40 times greater than that of a ground-based radio interferometer, and 20 million times greater that that of the human eye.

The project is designed to study super-massive black holes in the nuclei of close and remote galaxies, black holes in the stellar masses in our galaxy, neutron and probably quark stars, star and planet formation areas, and clouds of inter-stellar plasma.

Regrettably, the launch testing did not start in January 2008 as announced. There is every indication that its launch will be rescheduled for 2009.

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Labels: Aerospace-Engineering