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Glitter could be the key to seeing distant planets, experts say

Cosmic nebula (Thinkstock)

It seems that glitter is not just for disco balls and crafts anymore but may in fact could be the next big thing in our exploration of the universe. NASA announced this week that it is funding an innovative research project, dubbed Orbiting Rainbows, that is looking into using clouds of these shiny beads as a mirror for future space telescopes.

The big issue with today’s space telescopes is that they weigh tons and it is extremely expensive to launch them. Current costs of placing an asset into orbit is running at about $10,000 per pound, meaning that just to have a larger telescope mission lift off the Earth could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

While the Hubble space telescope got a convenient ride into orbit tucked away in the school bus sized cargo hold of the now retired space shuttles, engineers have to come up with innovative ways of packing up large telescopes. A great example of this is the James Webb Space Telescope that is currently under final preparations for a 2018 launch. The tennis-court sized telescope weighs some 7 tons and will have to be gingerly folded - origami style - into a rocket just to get into space.

However, any astronomer will tell you that when it comes to telescope size - bigger is always better. It’s much like having a bucket to collect water droplets. If you want to collect more rain water then you make the bucket wider. Same applies for telescopes and their mirrors; the wider the mirror, the more photons of light it can collect - meaning that it can render crisper, higher resolution images of distant objects. This makes telescopes essentially a giant light bucket.

“Resolving details [of objects] like an exoplanet demands extremely high resolution, which can only be achieved with very large telescopes. Large telescopes in space are very expensive and the trend for larger and larger apertures would lead to a prohibitive cost,” explained Marco Quadrelli, Principal Investigator of the project, who is a Research Technologist at NASA/JPL, and the inventor of the Orbiting Rainbows concept.

“Most of the cost is in fabricating the large mirror. If we were to find a solution that instead uses an ultra lightweight mirror, instead of a monolithic one, then extremely large apertures would be possible.”

Quarellli’s team has been able to, at least in the lab, create a small version of a glitter based mirror and even obtain visual images. While these test images are nowhere near the quality of what scientists would expect to practically use, they have proved that the concept is feasible.

How this science-fiction type of telescope works is that a large cloud of millions of glitter beads - are placed into orbit and then are corralled and trapped by a collection of soccer-ball sized micro satellites via shots of laser beams. The laser lights actually is able to push and orient each individual glitter bead so that the entire cloud of them are all oriented the same way and that they all are able to reflect light and focus light like a traditional, solid mirror would.

“The trapping happens because of pressure from the laser light — specifically, the momentum of photons translates into two forces: one that pushes particles away, and another that pushes the particles toward the axis of the light beam.” explained Quadrelli.

At this point NASA has plans to do further testing and refinement of their techniques of using laser beams to efficiently align the glitter and develop techniques to sharpen the images.

The space agency hopes one day to be testing a miniature version of the glitter scope on the International Space Station and if all goes well, have a functioning version floating in space in one or two decades.

“At this point in time, we hope that, if we can continue making steady progress, within 5 to 10 years we should be able to have a demonstrator in the ISS.” said Quadrelli.

NASA is so excited about the potential this technology holds that it has funding penciled in for the next 20 to 30 years, which the research team says that, barring any show stopping limitations, would be required to get a telescope up and running that would dwarf anything we have ever seen.

And if they can make this work, the cost-savings could be quite impressive too.

All things equal, namely substituting a monolithic mirror with the cloud mirror, Quadrelli estimates that they could get savings of up to 4 orders of magnitude with the Orbiting Rainbows concept.

But besides the financial savings such an innovative space telescope would offer, what really excites astronomers is the revolutionary views it could provide of the Universe.

It is theoretically possible that a cloud of glitter stretching upwards of many kilometers across could act as monster-sized telescope that would have the resolving power capable of imaging Earth-like planets around distant stars. Views of the planet may be as clear as what Apollo astronauts had looking back at Earth from the Moon. It may in fact be possible to even view weather patterns.

“Large apertures like these would indeed allow us not only to detect exoplanets, but also image their features such as continents and do spectroscopy [examine the chemistry] of their atmospheres.

And if we could combine the power of multiple glitter clouds that stretch for 100 million km between the planets, it would theoretically possible to even observe an exoplanet’s night side, perhaps revealing views of a vast web-like network of light pollution - what would be an indication of advanced alien life.

Who knew the possibilities with glitter would be so endless?