NASA chooses New Zealand site to test space telescope technologies
United States space scientists are to test new technologies for a powerful space-based telescope in an high-altitude balloon flight from New Zealand's South Island. The NASA space agency confirmed Monday it would launch a long-duration, heavy-lift super pressure balloon (SPB) from the town of Wanaka for the third year running. Read more
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has awarded $4.4 million to a collaboration of scientists at five United States universities and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre to help build a telescope for deployment on the International Space Station in 2017. The U.S. collaboration is part of a 13-nation effort to build the 2.5-meter ultraviolet telescope, called the Extreme Universe Space Observatory. Read more
Space observatory's detector technology goes into single-molecule imaging Since 1999, Yoshiyuki Takizawa has been working on the Extreme Universe Space Observatory (EUSO), an international project to develop a super wide-field telescope capable of observing large volumes of Earth's atmosphere in order to detect the arrival of high-energy cosmic particles. Along with other international astrophysicists, Takizawa has been developing a photon detector that will be a critical part of the new 2.5-metre EUSO telescope onboard the Kibo Japanese experiment module of the International Space Station. The module is to be launched by 2015. The detector will consist of six thousand 1-inch-square photomultiplier tubes, and will allow an area of about 400 kilometres in diameter of Earth's atmosphere to be imaged in each shot.