{"id":189979,"date":"2024-05-24T09:22:23","date_gmt":"2024-05-24T14:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/fluidic-telescope-flute-enabling-the-next-generation-of-large-space-observatories"},"modified":"2024-05-24T09:22:23","modified_gmt":"2024-05-24T14:22:23","slug":"fluidic-telescope-flute-enabling-the-next-generation-of-large-space-observatories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/fluidic-telescope-flute-enabling-the-next-generation-of-large-space-observatories","title":{"rendered":"Fluidic Telescope (FLUTE): Enabling the Next Generation of Large Space Observatories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/fluidic-telescope-flute-enabling-the-next-generation-of-large-space-observatories.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The future of space-based UV\/optical\/IR astronomy requires ever larger telescopes. The highest priority astrophysics targets, including Earth-like exoplanets, first generation stars, and early galaxies, are all extremely faint, which presents an ongoing challenge for current missions and is the opportunity space for next generation telescopes: larger telescopes are the primary way to address this issue.<\/p>\n<p>With mission costs depending strongly on aperture diameter, scaling current space telescope technologies to aperture sizes beyond 10 m does not appear economically viable. Without a breakthrough in scalable technologies for large telescopes, future advances in astrophysics may slow down or even completely stall. Thus, there is a need for cost-effective solutions to scale space telescopes to larger sizes.<\/p>\n<p>The FLUTE project aims to overcome the limitations of current approaches by paving a path towards space observatories with large aperture, unsegmented liquid primary mirrors, suitable for a variety of astronomical applications. Such mirrors would be created in space via a novel approach based on fluidic shaping in microgravity, which has already been successfully demonstrated in a laboratory neutral buoyancy environment, in parabolic microgravity flights, and aboard the International Space Station (ISS).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The future of space-based UV\/optical\/IR astronomy requires ever larger telescopes. The highest priority astrophysics targets, including Earth-like exoplanets, first generation stars, and early galaxies, are all extremely faint, which presents an ongoing challenge for current missions and is the opportunity space for next generation telescopes: larger telescopes are the primary way to address this issue. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}