ESO: Snow Falling on ALMA Telescopes

Credit: ESO/José Francisco Salgado

This image shows a wintry La Silla Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert sitting beneath the Milky Way.

Despite the telescopes’ location in one of the best areas for astronomical observation, at an altitude of 7800 feet (2400 meters), the desert cannot completely escape winter weather, including snow blanketing the mountain peak and telescope domes.

The high altitude sites operated by the ESA European Southern Observatory (ESO) can experience both hot and cold temperatures through the year, including sometimes harsh conditions. 

NASA Considers Missions for 2 Donated Spy Satellite Telescopes

The Hubble Space Telescope got one last overhaul in May 2009 by NASA astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis and has been sending home stunning new photos ever since. 

Seen here, the iconic space telescope orbits high above the Earth, after it was released at the close of the STS-125 servicing mission to once more gaze deep into the universe.

CREDIT: NASA

NASA is sorting through a variety of possible uses for a pair of powerful spy satellite telescopes that fell into the agency's lap last year.

In November, NASA asked scientists to suggest missions for the telescopes, which were donated by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and are comparable in size and appearance to the famous Hubble Space Telescope.

More than 60 serious proposals came flooding in, the most promising of which were presented in early February at the Study on Applications of Large Space Optics (SALSO) workshop in Huntsville, Ala.

"There was a lot of excitement in the scientific community when these were transferred to NASA, because they are world-class, Hubble-class telescopes, optics," said SALSO project manager George Fletcher, of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

The two scopes were originally built to carry out surveillance missions under a multibillion-dollar NRO program called Future Imagery Architecture, but cost overruns and delays killed the program in 2005, and NASA announced in June 2012 that the NRO had bequeathed the instruments to the space agency.

While the telescopes' 8-foot-wide (2.4 meters) main mirrors are comparable to that of Hubble, the NRO instruments are designed to have a much wider field of view, NASA officials have said.

Seven big ideas
The ideas presented at the SALSO workshop fall into seven broad categories, meeting organizers and a technical review team determined:

• Mars-orbiting space telescope
• Exoplanet observatory
• General-purpose faint object explorer
• Advanced, Hubble-like visible light/ultraviolet telescope
• Optical communications node in space (which would aid transmissions to and from deep-space assets)
• Geospace dynamic observatory (which would study space weather and the sun-Earth system)
• Research of Earth's upper atmosphere (from a spot aboard the International Space Station)
• The SALSO workshop did not look into another possible use — incorporating one of the NRO scopes into NASA's proposed $1.5 billion Wide-Field Infrared Survey
• Telescope, a high-priority mission that would hunt for exoplanets and probe the mysteries of dark energy — because a separate research team is already investigating this possibility.

The SALSO workshop did not look into another possible use — incorporating one of the NRO scopes into NASA's proposed $1.5 billion Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIST), a high-priority mission that would hunt for exoplanets and probe the mysteries of dark energy — because a separate research team is already investigating this possibility.

The results of that second study, known as AFTA (Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets), are downloadable. A more serious examination of the ideas presented at SALSO can now begin.

NASA Telescopes Discover Strobe-Like Flashes in a Suspected Binary Protostar

NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have teamed up to uncover a mysterious infant star that behaves like a police strobe light.

Left: This is a false-color, infrared-light Spitzer image of LRLL 54361 inside the star-forming region IC 348 located 950 light-years away and has an unusual variable object that has the typical signature of a protostar.

• Larger image Center: This Hubble Space Telescope monochromatic-colour image resolves the detailed structure around the protostar, consisting of two cavities that are traced by light scattered off their edges above and below a dusty disk.
• Larger image Right: This is an artist's impression of the hypothesized central object that may be two young binary stars.
• Larger image Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Muzerolle (STScI), E. Furlan (NOAO and Caltech), K. Flaherty (Univ. of Ariz./Steward Observatory), Z. Balog (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy), and R. Gutermuth (Univ. Mass. Amherst) 

Image acknowledgment: R. Hurt (Caltech/Spitzer Science Center) Two of NASA's great observatories, the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, have teamed up to uncover a mysterious infant star that behaves like a strobe light.

Every 25.34 days, the object, designated LRLL 54361, unleashes a burst of light. Although a similar phenomenon has been observed in two other young stellar objects, this is the most powerful such beacon seen to date.