Liquid Cosmos –The NexGen Space Telescopes

It wasn’t that long ago that I was singing the praises of the Hubble Telescope, and pre-empting the replacement telescope that is to follow late this decade, the James Webb Space Telescope. So what happens when something totally new and a hundred times better comes along to replace them within a few weeks?

Okay, I might be overstating the point. But Richard Angel, a leading astronomer at the University of Arizona, believes that the next leap in telescopic invention is going to be the liquid telescope. Not a new technology – having been originally thought up by Italian astronomer Ernesto Capocci in 1850 in the form of a dish of mercury working as the primary mirror in a telescope – liquid telescopes are only now reaching the stage where they are becoming the more viable option to the more traditional mirrors, like the ones aboard Hubble; and all you need to do is look at the repair record on Hubble to see how well they’ve worked out!

The plan, according to Angel, is to design a 100-meter telescope (larger than two football fields side by side), that would be able to acquire 1,736 times more light than the Hubble telescope is currently able to collect. This obviously would allow for pictures greater in detail, and the ability to investigate phenomenon further back in space-time. However the more likely telescope to be implemented in the near future will be a 20-meter telescope, still 70 times more sensitive than the JWST.

Paul Hickson, a Canadian astronomer from the University of British Columbia, collaborated with Angel on his theories and proposition for a lunar LMT (liquid mirror telescope), is one of the creators of the third largest LMT in North America. Along with Ermanno Borra - a physicist and LMT pioneer at Laval University in Quebec, and who was the first to make a case for a lunar LMT back in 1991 – Hickson built the Large Zenith Telescope in British Columbia.

Though a manned mission to the moon will be required to implement anything approaching the 20-meter telescope desired, funding is available for such projects. It is simply whether funding is available for manned missions to the moon that seem to be standing between Angel and his dreams.

Posted by Josh Hill

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Comments

[Jack Butler]

I believe the way the telescope is formed is by rotation. Velocity rises in direct proportion to distance from the center of a rotating frame. Kinetic energy depends on the square of velocity. Therefore the mercury will experience kinetic energy in direct proportion to the square of the distance, which will cause an elevation of the mercury proportional to the square of the distance--but this is the formula for a parabola, so the result is that of a parabolic mirror. Mercury for mass and reflectivity. The rotation will have to be astonishingly precise in order for the mirror to have no flaws, but our technical people can produce amazing accuracies nowadays.

[Robert Wood]

HST suffered mirror inaccuracies due to hubris. The mirror was never allowed to be Focalt tested, which would have revealed the discrepancy of its focal length. This was told to me by a person who worked on the project and was forbiden to perform the relatively simple test commonly done on telescope mirrors.

[Duncan Lunan]

John Braithwaite (now of Braithwaite Telescopes) and I put this idea up to NASA in the late 1960s. Our slogan was "Give us a Saturn V and we'll send a 200-inch to the Moon in a bottle". But of course we'd have insisted on on-site inspection.

[Sunderajan]

No doubt liquid telescope is a great idea. But and this is a big BUT,It it is essential that there is atleast a minimum gravity field for it to work.It may wrk on moon or other planets or even small asteroids but it cannot work on any type of orbiting satellite