Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT)

Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), located near Pune in India, is an array of radio telescopes at metre wavelengths. It is operated by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, a part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. At the time it was built, it was world's largest interferometric array.The GMRT is located around 80 km north of Pune at Khodad. A nearby town is Narayangaon which is around 9 km from the telescope. The office of NCRA is located in the University of Pune campus right next to IUCAAThe GMRT contains 30 fully steerable telescopes. There are fourteen telescopes randomly arranged in the central square 1 km by 1 km in size, with a further sixteen arranged in three arms of a nearly "Y"-shaped array each having a length of 14 km from the array centre. The GMRT is an interferometer which uses a technique known as aperture synthesis to make images of radio sources. The GMRT operates in six frequency bands centered at 38, 153, 233, 327, 610, and 1420 MHz.

Each antenna is 45 metres in diameter with the reflector made of wire rope stretched between metal struts in a parabolic configuration. This configuration works because of the long wavelengths (21 cm and longer) at which the telescope operates. Each antenna has four different receivers mounted at the focus. Each individual receiver assembly can rotate so that the user can select the frequency at which to observe.
The maximum baseline in the array gives the telescope an angular resolution (the smallest angular scale that can be distinguished) of about 1 arcsecond at the frequency of neutral hydrogen (1420 MHz).One of the important aims of the telescope is to search for the highly redshifted 21-cm line radiation from primordial neutral hydrogen clouds in order to determine the epoch of galaxy formation in the universe. Pulsar research is another major area for GMRT study.
Astronomers from all over the world regularly use this telescope to observe many different astronomical objects such as HII regions, galaxies, pulsars, supernovae, and sun and solar winds.

GRACE (Gamma Ray Astrophysics Coordinated Experiments)

AN international-class facility for fundamental research in gamma-ray astronomy is being set up at Mt. Abu in Rajasthan. The project, called
GRACE (Gamma Ray Astrophysics Coordinated Experiments), is implemented by the Nuclear Research Laboratory Division of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai. The GRACE facility was inaugurated on October 13, 1997 by Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Dr. R. Chidambaram. BARC Director Dr. Anil Kakodkar and other senior scientists attended the function.

When it is fully operational, GRACE will facilitate the exploration of the entire gamma-ray window of the electromagnetic spectrum from one location through four time-coordinated experiments. Four gamma-ray telescope facilities - TACTIC, MYSTIQUE, MACE and BEST - will be established at Mt. Abu over 10 years. TACTIC is a TeV (Terra electron Volts) Atmospheric Cerenkov Telescope with Imaging Camera; MYSTIQUE is a Multi-element Ultra-Sensitive Telescope for Quanta of Ultra-high Energy; MACE is a Major Atmospheric Cerenkov Experiment; and BEST is a Bust Exploration through Scintillation Technique.

Gamma-ray astronomy provides a powerful tool to investigate some of the mysteries of the cosmos and the astrophysical objects that populate it. These relate to the nature of the central power-house in active galactic nuclei and the high-energy processes operating in and around black holes, X-ray binaries, neutron stars (pulsars) and supernova remnants. This window is also likely to provide important clues to the origin of cosmic ray particles, which are known to bombard the earth continuously. Major experimental efforts, both satellite-based and ground-based, using state-of-the-art equipment and software, are under way at a number of research institutions in different parts of the world to obtain fresh perspectives of the universe through gamma-ray astronomy. Among the Indian institutions that conduct experiments in this field are BARC, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).

Two milestones have been crossed since the GRACE project got under way four years ago - the commissioning of the imaging element of the TACTIC telescope and the installation of a prototype MYSTIQUE array station. TACTIC, India's first such telescope, deploys a 3.5-metre-diameter light collector of a quasi-paraboloid shape, which is made up of 32 high-quality spherical mirrors of 60-cm diameter.

TACTIC's imaging element began trial observations of gamma-ray sources on March 1, 1997. In April-May 1997, it was used to observe the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant in the galaxy. Subsequently, it detected gamma-ray signals from two extragalactic sources, Markarian-421 and Markarian-501, which are believed to harbour massive black holes at their centre. Markarian-501 is more than 300 million light years away. While no significant signal from Markarian-421 was recorded, TACTIC was able to "catch" a flare from Markarian-501 during April-May 1997; it resulted in the detection of a highly significant TeV gamma-ray signal within 50 hours of observation. A conventional, non-imaging telescope would have taken at least 5,000 hours to do this. This result was confirmed by contemporaneous observations made by four other high-sensitivity Cerenkov Imaging Telescopes in the United States, France, Germany and Japan. This was the first ever contemporaneous detection of a celestial gamma-ray source from more than one location.

Mt. Abu is one of the best sites in India for astronomical observation. According to Dr. C.L. Bhat, head of the Nuclear Research Laboratory-High Altitude Research Laboratory, the hill station was chosen for the site because of its high altitude, and because it has cloud-free skies for most of the year. Besides, Mt. Abu is on more or less the same longitude as three other observation sites with gamma-ray telescopes: Tian-Shan in Kazakhstan, Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh and Udhagamandalam in Tamil Nadu.

In Mt. Abu, the GRACE facility is provisionally located at a place called Oriya; it will later shift to nearby Gurushikhar. The choice of Gurushikhar as the permanent site was made after a site-selection programme undertaken by BARC covering ten candidate sites in six States. At Gurushikhar, the project will be environment-friendly. Noise and light pollution will be kept under control, and the project will not necessitate any significant denudation of forest cover.

The GRACE project will provide for remote-handling and control of telescopes through satellite communication links. In addition to the Department of Atomic Energy, the project is being supported by the Department of Science and Technology under the Indo-Russian Integrated Long-Term Programme of Scientific Cooperation. Under this programme, blueprints for the mechanical structure and sub-assemblies of the TACTIC telescope were supplied by the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow. In the current phase of collaboration with the Lebedev Institute, coordinated observation campaigns on gamma-ray sources are conducted from Tian-Shan by the Lebedev group and from Mt. Abu by the BARC team. In another international collaboration project involving scientists from BARC and the Kernforschen-guszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany, the TACTIC telescope array is to be used for cosmic-ray mass-composition studies through the independent Cerenkov route.

Square Kilometre Array(SKA):In Australian Outback

From the Byrd telescope in West Virginia, to the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, to the MeerKAT system in South Africa, the world is not hurting for gigantic radio telescopes. These large arrays are precise and powerful, but come 2024, they will all be eclipsed by the capability of the Square Kilometre Array(radio telescope)—a telescope system big enough to answer science's deepest questions about the nature of our universe

When it’s finished in 2024, the Square Kilometer Array telescope will search the sky for evidence of the early universe and alien life with a footprint that stretches 3,000 km across. With thousands of relatively small dishes and antennas dotting the hinterlands of Africa and Australia, the SKA will boast one single dish every one single square kilometer, or 1,000,000 square meters. For reference, the current largest single dish radio telescope in the world, the famed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, is about 73,000 square meters, while West Virginia’s Green Bank telescope (which Motherboard profiled here), measures about 7,800 square meters. Around 50 times more powerful than any radio telescope yet devised, the SKA will be able to register an airport radar on a planet 50 light-years from Earth, a distance of around 300 trillion miles.

When it comes to radio telescopy, systems come in two varieties—humongous single dishes like 305-meter-wide Aricebo or as a collective of smaller individual dishes coordinating, like the MEERKAT array. Arrays boast a distinctive advantage over the dishes—the smaller individual dishes can be spread over a vastly larger area than a single dish could ever cover, granting the array a much greater collection area. Bigger collection areas translate into a larger searchable field of view and more data to study. The MeerKAT, current record holder for largest and most precise array telescope, has a collection area of about 18,000 square meters. When the $1.9 billion SKA is completed, it will provide, as its name suggests, a million square meters of collection area. It will be fifty times more precise than any other radio system on the planet, and it will be able to survey the sky ten thousand times faster than current systems. Ten thousand.

The SKA project has been in development since 1991 and is comprised of 20 nations.When it comes to radio telescopy, systems come in two varieties—humongous single dishes like 305-meter-wide Aricebo or as a collective of smaller individual dishes coordinating, like the MEERKAT Array. Arrays boast a distinctive advantage over the dishes—the smaller individual dishes can be spread over a vastly larger area than a single dish could ever cover, granting the array a much greater collection area. Bigger collection areas translate into a larger searchable field of view and more data to study. The MeerKAT, current record holder for largest and most precise array telescope, has a collection area of about 18,000 square meters. When the $1.9 billion SKA is completed, it will provide, as its name suggests, a million square meters of collection area. It will be fifty times more precise than any other radio system on the planet, and it will be able to survey the sky ten thousand times faster than current systems. Tenthousand.

The SKA project has been in development since 1991 and is comprised of 20 nations. The system will be broken into two halves—one site in rural South Africa (as well as remote sites in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia). The other half will be in Australia's and New Zealand's most remote regions. These locations were chosen because the Southern Hemisphere has a better view of the Milky Way, and it provides the least amounts of man-made radio interference.

The array itself will be populated by about 3,000 individual 15-meter tall, 12-meter wide receivers that, with help from its sister arrays, will span the 70 MHz to 10 GHz spectrum. The SKA will feature a core group of receivers at each site as well as 2,000 mile-long tendrils extending out from the center (which is why the S. African group also has partners in eight other African nations). These arms will be tied together by high-speed fiber optic lines which will dump roughly 937,500 terabytes of data into a central-processing super computer every day—that's 100 times today's global internet traffic. In addition, the system will also employ a mid-frequency aperture array consisting of 250 separate stations, each of which uses 160,000 receivers, and a low-frequency aperture array boasting 2.5 million receivers used to detect neutral hydrogen, a building block of the early universe. In all, this will provide the highest resolution images in all of astronomy.

The array is being constructed in three phases, which is ingenious because it will allow the telescope to begin working before it's fully operational. The first phase will involve repurposing the existing 64-dish MeerKAT system while building 190 more in 2016. "The decision recognises MeerKAT as a key instrument that will make up one quarter of SKA Phase 1 mid-frequency array, and the science planned for SKA Phase 1 is very similar to the MeerKAT science case—just much more ambitious," Professor Justin Jonas, Associate Director: Science and Engineering at SKA South Africa, explained in a press release. "Our researchers and students who participate in the MeerKAT surveys have a huge advantage. They are well placed to enter SKA Phase 1. They have the opportunity to become science leaders in future SKA projects."

That leadership comes at a price, mind you. By the project's completion, the low frequency arrays alone will number in the millions. So, in order to keep costs from skyrocketing, engineers at Cambridge University, who had already designed a low frequency receiver for the SKA project, turned to Cambridge Consultants, a cutting-edge technology design and development firm, for assistance.

The team from Cambridge Consultants was tasked with modifying the existing prototype design to make it cheaper and easier to produce, less expensive to ship, and easier to assemble in the field—all while maintaining the receiver's structural integrity and environmental resistance.

"The challenge of volume manufacture is at the forefront of our work with the SKA program," Gary Kemp, Program Director at Cambridge Consultants, said in a press release. "The two-meter-tall antennas will have to be manufactured in very high volumes – more than 2.5 million will be required, in addition to the 40 million antennas of the mid-frequency array. So ‘commercializing' the design through the design for manufacture process is critical to the feasibility of the SKA. To see a mature design for part of the physical hardware that will make up the core of the world's biggest telescope is an important step towards the construction of the final instrument."

To further reduce costs, the team used injection molded plastics as an inexpensive means of insulating the antenna support structure. As for the control electronics, Cambridge Consultants turned to the mobile phone industry and employed mainly off-the-shelf PCB components normally used for front-end amplifiers. In all, the Cambridge Consultants team believes that they can effectively mass produce, ship, and install these arrays for just €70 or roughly $100 American per unit.

FAST: largest single-aperture radio telescope ,by china

Since its completion in 1963, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, with a diameter of 305 m (1,000 ft) and a collecting area of 73,000 square meters (790,000 sq ft), has been the largest single-aperture radio telescope ever constructed. But Arecibo is set to lose its title with construction now underway in Guizhou Province in southern China of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Upon its expected completion in 2016, FAST will be able to see more than three times further into space and survey the skies ten times faster than Arecibo.

FAST was first proposed by China for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which has since opted to combine the signals of thousands of smaller antennae spread over a distance of more than 3,000 km (1,864 miles), combining for a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometer (0.38 square miles). The SKA will be built in the southern hemisphere with South Africa and Australia currently vying for the right to host the project.

Despite this, an international review and advisory conference on the science and technology of FAST held in Beijing in 2006 concluded FAST was feasible. In the following year funding for FAST was given the green light and the approved budget now sits at CNY700 million (approx. US$107.9 million). Construction in the Dawodang depression in south Guizhou commenced in March.

Unlike Arecibo, which has a fixed spherical curvature focusing radio waves into a line above the dish where they are focused to a single point by more mirrors, FAST's cable-net supporting structure will be able to deform the surface in real time through active control. As PopSci explains, this will allow a subset dish's 4,400 triangular aluminum panels to form a parabolic mirror anywhere within the larger bowl that is nearly the size of the entire Arecibo dish.

Using FAST's unparalleled sensitivity and high surveying speed, the project is expected to enable the surveying of neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way and other galaxies, the detection of new pulsars (both galactic and extragalactic), the search for the first shining stars, and of perhaps most interest to many people, the search for extraterrestrial life. It is expected to be able to detect transmissions from over 1,000 light years away.

With a construction period of 5.5 years, FAST is due to be completed in 2016.

Arms Trade Treaty

Virtually all international trade in goods is regulated. But no globally agreed standards exist for the international arms trade. The result can be the misuse of transferred weaponry by government forces, or diversion of arms into illegal markets, where they end up in the hands of criminals, gangs, war lords and terrorists.

Repairing the damage caused by crime, gang violence or piracy - often fueled by reckless arms and ammunition transfers - vastly exceeds the initial financial profits of selling weapons. United Nations Peacekeeping alone costs the world $7 billion per year, and the global annual burden of armed violence stands at $400 billion. Without adequate regulation of international arms transfers and high common standards to guide national export decisions, the human tolls and financial costs will remain colossal.


A dire consequence of inadequate controls on arms transfers and the ensuing widespread availability and misuse of weapons is the frequent obstruction of life-saving humanitarian operations. Threats and actual attacks against staff from the United Nations and from other humanitarian organizations have multiplied. Between 2000 and 2010, around 800 humanitarian workers were killed in armed attacks and close to 700 were injured.

Since the 1990s, civil society organizations have urged governments to take action. As a result, in 2009 the General Assembly decided to convene a Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty in 2012 "to elaborate a legally binding instrument on the highest possible common international standards for the transfer of conventional arms"

The United Nations Final Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty will take place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on 18-28 March 2013. The first round of negotiations took place in July 2012, but did not result in an agreement on a treaty text.

The ATT will not:
• Interfere with the domestic arms trade and the way a country regulates civilian possession
• Ban, or prohibit the export of, any type of weapons
• Impair States' legitimate right to self-defence
• Lower arms regulation standards in countries where these are already at a high level.
An Arms Trade Treaty will aim to create a level playing field for international arms transfers by requiring all States to abide by a set of standards for transfer controls, which will ultimately benefit the safety and security of people everywhere in the world.

HAGAR telescope system

HAGAR telescope system is co alignment of 7 mirrors mounted para-axially with the guiding telescope and the telescope axes. The following procedure was developed to attain good accuracy in the pointing of telescopes as well as all mirrors in each telescope.
Alignment of guiding telescope with the telescope axes was done by sighting large number of bright stars. A CCD camera (ST-4) was used to obtain the pointing data and pointing models for the guide telescopes were worked out.
All mirrors in a telescope were initially co-aligned with the guide telescope by sighting a distant stationary light source. There after, several scans in RA/DEC space were performed by pointing the telescopes to isolated bright stars. In these scans, the direction of telescopes are offset from the direction of star in RA and DEC in steps of 0.5 deg and the photo-tube count rates are recorded.

Profles of count rate as a function of offset was generated for each mirror. The centroid of these profiles give the pointing direction of mirror, or rather offsets in the pointing of each mirror with respect to the telescope direction.

Based on these offsets the mirror alignments were fine tuned and checked by repeated RA-DEC scans. These scans also provide data on the pointing of mirrors as a function of altitude and azimuth. They are used for fine tuning pointing models of all telescopes as well.

The High Altitude Gamma Ray Telescope (HAGAR) is an atmospheric Cerenkov experiment with 7 
telescopes setup in 2008.IT is the part of  the Indian Astronomical Observatory (IAO), located near Leh in Ladakh, India, has one of the world's highest sites for optical, infrared and gamma-ray telescopes. 

It is operated by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore.It is currently the second highest optical telescope in the world.The Indian Astronomical Observatory stands on Mt. Saraswati, Digpa-ratsa Ri, Hanle in south-eastern Ladakh in the eastern Jammu and Kashmir state of India

Planck spacecraft

Planck is a space observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA) and designed to observe the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over the entire sky, at a high sensitivity and angular resolution. Planck was built in the Cannes Mandelieu Space Center by Thales Alenia Space and created as the third Medium-Sized Mission (M3) of the European Space Agency's Horizon 2000 Scientific Programme. The project, initially called COBRAS/SAMBA, is named in honour of the German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947), who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
Planck was launched in May 2009, reaching the Earth/Sun's L2 point in July, and by February 2010 had successfully started a second all-sky survey. On 21 March 2013, the mission's first all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background was released. (See below.)
The mission complements and improves upon observations made by the NASA Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has measured the anisotropies at larger angular scales and lower sensitivity than Planck. Planck provides a major source of information relevant to several cosmological and astrophysical issues, such as testing theories of the early universe and the origin of cosmic structure.

Comparison of CMB results from COBE, WMAP and Planck

Planck started its First All-Sky Survey on 13 August 2009. In September 2009, the European Space Agency announced the preliminary results from the Planck First Light Survey, which was performed to demonstrate the stability of the instruments and the ability to calibrate them over long periods. The results indicated that the data quality is excellent.

-On 15 January 2010 the mission was extended by 12 months, with observation continuing until at least the end of 2011. After the successful conclusion of the First Survey, the spacecraft started its Second All Sky Survey on 14 February 2010, with more than 95% of the sky observed already and 100% sky coverage being expected by mid-June 2010.
Some planned pointing list data from 2009 have been released publicly, along with a video visualization of the surveyed sky.

-On 17 March 2010 the first Planck photos were published, showing dust concentration within 500 light years from the Sun.

-On 5 July 2010, the Planck mission delivered its first all-sky image.
The first public scientific result of Planck is the Early-Release Compact-Source Catalogue, released in January 2011 during a conference in Paris.

2013 data release

-On 21 March 2013, the European-led research team behind the Planck cosmology probe released the mission's first all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background. The map suggests the universe is slightly older than thought. According to the map, subtle fluctuations in temperature were imprinted on the deep sky when the cosmos was about 370,000 years old. The imprint reflects ripples that arose as early, in the existence of the universe, as the first nonillionth (10-30) of a second. Apparently, these ripples gave rise to the present vast cosmic web of galaxy clusters and dark matter. The team estimates the universe to be 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years old, containing 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy.[16] Also, the Hubble constant was measured to be 67.80 ± 0.77 (km/s)/Mpc

World's largest solar telescope planned near Ladakh's Pangong lake

India is expected to start building the world's largest solar telescope on the icy heights of Ladakh to study the sun's atmosphere and understand the formation of sun-spots and their decay process.

The Rs 300-crore project is expected to come up at either Hanle or Merak, which is very near to the Ladakh's Pangong lake along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China.

Currently, the world's largest solar telescope is the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope with an aperture size of 1.6 metres in Kitt Peak National Observatory at Arizona in the US.

"Fabrication of the National Large Solar Telescope is expected to begin in late 2013," Siraj Hasan, principal investigator for the project, told reporters on the sidelines of the 100th Indian Science Congress here.

The telescope, with an aperture size of two meters, is planned to be completed by 2017 and will be the largest such facility in the world at least till 2020 when US is expected to commission its four-meter telescope at Hawaii.

The main objective of the facility would be to study the formation and decay of sun spots, their subsurface structure and why do they have a penumbra and how is it formed, Hasan said.

Most of the back-end instruments of the telescope would be made in-house and the instrument for night time observations would be developed in collaboration with Hamburg Observatory in Germany.

NLST is expected to be a unique research tool which is likely to attract several talented solar astronomers to the country and provide a superior platform for performing high quality solar research, Hasan said.

Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics is the nodal agency for the project, which also has participation from Indian Space Research Organization, Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, IUCAA, IISc and IISER.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST)

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope that was carried into orbit by a Space Shuttle in 1990 and remains in operation. A 2.4-meter (7.9 ft) aperture telescope in low Earth orbit, Hubble's four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared. The telescope is named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble.
Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to take extremely sharp images with almost no background light. Hubble's Deep Field have been some of the most detailed visible-light images ever, allowing a deep view into space and time. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as accurately determining the rate of expansion of the universe.
Although not the first space telescope, Hubble is one of the largest and most versatile, and is well known as both a vital research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy. The HST was built by the United States space agency NASA, with contributions from the European Space Agency, and is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute. The HST is one of NASA's Great Observatories, along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Space telescopes were proposed as early as 1923. Hubble was funded in the 1970s, with a proposed launch in 1983, but the project was beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the Challenger disaster. When finally launched in 1990, scientists found that the main mirror had been ground incorrectly, compromising the telescope's capabilities. The telescope was restored to its intended quality by a servicing mission in 1993.
Hubble is the only telescope designed to be serviced in space by astronauts. Between 1993 and 2002, four missions repaired, upgraded, and replaced systems on the telescope; a fifth mission was canceled on safety grounds following the Columbia disaster. However, after spirited public discussion, NASA administrator Mike Griffin approved one final servicing mission, completed in 2009 by Space Shuttle Atlantis. The telescope is now expected to function until at least 2013. Its scientific successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is to be launched in 2018 or possibly later.

The Spitzer Space Telescope (SST)

The Spitzer Space Telescope (SST), formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) is an infrared space observatory launched in 2003. It is the fourth and final of the NASA Great Observatories program.
The planned mission period was to be 2.5 years with a pre-launch expectation that the mission could extend to five or slightly more years until the onboard liquid helium supply was exhausted. This occurred on 15 May 2009.Without liquid helium to cool the telescope to the very cold temperatures needed to operate, most instruments are no longer usable. However, the two shortest wavelength modules of the IRAC camera are still operable with the same sensitivity as before the cryogen was exhausted, and will continue to be used in the Spitzer Warm Mission.
In keeping with NASA tradition, the telescope was renamed after successful demonstration of operation, on December 18, 2003. Unlike most telescopes which are named after famous deceased astronomers by a board of scientists, the name for SIRTF was obtained from a contest open to the general public.
The contest led to the telescope being named in honor of Lyman Spitzer, one of the 20th century's great scientists. Though he was not the first to propose the idea of the space telescope (Hermann Oberth being the first, in Wege zur Raumschiffahrt, 1929,and also in Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen, 1923),Spitzer wrote a 1946 report for RAND describing the advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory and how it could be realized with available (or upcoming) technology.[8][9] He has been cited for his pioneering contributions to rocketry and astronomy, as well as "his vision and leadership in articulating the advantages and benefits to be realized from the Space Telescope Program."
The US$800 million Spitzer was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, on a Delta II 7920H ELV rocket, Monday, 25 August 2003 at 13:35:39 UTC-5 (EDT).
It follows a rather unusual orbit, heliocentric instead of geocentric, trailing and drifting away from Earth's orbit at approximately 0.1 astronomical unit per year (a so-called "earth-trailing" orbit). The primary mirror is 85 centimetres (33 in) in diameter, f/12 and made of beryllium and was cooled to 5.5 K (−449.77 °F). The satellite contains three instruments that allowed it to perform astronomical imaging and photometry from 3 to 180 micrometers, spectroscopy from 5 to 40 micrometers, and spectrophotometry from 5 to 100 micrometers.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a space telescope launched on STS-93 by NASA on July 23, 1999. Chandra is sensitive to X-ray sources 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope, enabled by the high angular resolution of its mirrors. Since the Earth's atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays, they are not detectable from Earth-based telescopes; therefore space-based telescopes are required to make these observations. Chandra is an Earth satellite in a 64 hour orbit, and its mission is ongoing as of 2013.
Chandra is one of the Great Observatories, along with the Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (1991-2000), and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Chandra has been described as being as revolutionary to astronomy as Galileo's first telescope.

It was named in honor of the Nobel-prize winning Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar who worked for University of Chicago from 1937 until he died in 1995. He was known for determining the maximum mass for white dwarfs. "Chandra" means "moon" in Sanskrit. Before 1998, it was known as AXAF, the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility. AXAF was assembled and tested by TRW (now Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems) in Redondo Beach, California.

Chandra has been returning data since the month after it launched. It is operated by the SAO at the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with assistance from MIT and Northrop Grumman Space Technology. The ACIS CCDs suffered particle damage during early radiation belt passages. To prevent further damage, the instrument is now removed from the telescope's focal plane during passages.
Although Chandra was initially given an expected lifetime of 5 years, on 4 September 2001 NASA extended its lifetime to 10 years "based on the observatory's outstanding results."Physically Chandra could last much longer. A study performed at the Chandra X-ray Center indicated that the observatory could last at least 15 years.In July 2008, the International X-ray Observatory, a joint project between ESA, NASA and JAXA, was proposed as the next major X-ray observatory but was later cancelled. Its expected launch date would have been 2020.


The data gathered by Chandra have greatly advanced the field of X-ray astronomy.

-The first light image, of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, gave astronomers their first glimpse of the compact object at the center of the remnant, probably a neutron star or black hole. (Pavlov, et al., 2000)
-In the Crab Nebula, another supernova remnant, Chandra showed a never-before-seen ring around the central pulsar and jets that had only been partially seen by earlier telescopes. (Weisskopf, et al., 2000)
-The first X-ray emission was seen from the super massive black hole, Sagittarius A*, at the center of the Milky Way. (Baganoff, et al., 2001)
-Chandra found much more cool gas than expected spiraling into the center of the Andromeda Galaxy.
-Pressure fronts were observed in detail for the first time in Abell 2142, where clusters of galaxies are merging.
-The earliest images in X-rays of the shock wave of a supernova were taken of SN 1987A.
-Chandra showed for the first time the shadow of a small galaxy as it is being cannibalized by a larger one, in an image of Perseus A.
-A new type of black hole was discovered in galaxy M82, mid-mass objects purported to be the missing link between stellar-sized black holes and super massive black holes. (Griffiths, et al., 2000)

-Hubble constant measured to be 76.9 km/s/Mpc using Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect.
-2006 Chandra found strong evidence that dark matter exists by observing super cluster collision
2006 X-ray emitting loops, rings and filaments discovered around a super massive black hole within Messier 87 imply the presence of pressure waves, shock waves and sound waves. The evolution of Messier 87 may have been dramatically affected.
-Observations of the Bullet cluster put limits on the cross-section of the self-interaction of dark matter.
-"The Hand of God" photograph of PSR B1509-58.
-Jupiter's x-rays coming from poles, not auroral ring.
-A large halo of hot gas was found surrounding the Milky Way.

The New Horizons Mission:searching new frontier

In 2006, NASA dispatched an ambassador to the planetary frontier. The New Horizons spacecraft is now halfway between Earth and Pluto, on approach for a dramatic flight past the icy planet and its moons in July 2015. 

After 10 years and more than 3 billion miles, on a historic voyage that has already taken it over the storms and around the moons of Jupiter, New Horizons will shed light on new kinds of worlds we've only just discovered on the outskirts of the solar system. 

Pluto gets closer by the day, and New Horizons continues into rare territory, as just the fifth probe to traverse interplanetary space so far from the Sun. And the first to travel so far, to reach a new planet for exploration. 

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers mission category, larger and more expensive than Discovery missions but smaller than the Flagship Program. The cost of the mission (including spacecraft and instrument development, launch vehicle, mission operations, data analysis, and education/public outreach) is approximately 650 million USD over 15 years (from 2001 to 2016). An earlier proposed Pluto mission—Pluto Kuiper Express—was cancelled by NASA in 2000 for budgetary reasons. Further information relating to an overview with historical context[2] can be found at the IEEE website and gives further background and details, with more details regarding the Jupiter fly-by.

JUpiter ICy Moon Explorer (JUICE) mission

The JUpiter ICy Moon Explorer (JUICE) is a planned European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft to visit the Jovian system, focused in particular on studying three of Jupiter's moons; Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. It will characterise these worlds, all thought to have significant bodies of liquid water beneath their surfaces, as potentially habitable environments. Selection of the mission for the L1 launch slot of ESA's Cosmic Vision science programme was announced on May 2, 2012
The Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) would perform detailed investigations on Ganymede( largest moon of jupiter ) as a planetary body and evaluate its potential to support life. Investigations of Europa and Callisto would complete a comparative picture of these Galilean moons. The three moons are believed to harbour internal liquid water oceans, and so are central to understanding the habitability of icy worlds.
The main science objectives for Ganymede, and to a lesser extent for Callisto, are:
Characterisation of the ocean layers and detection of putative subsurface water reservoirs;
Topographical, geological and compositional mapping of the surface;
Study of the physical properties of the icy crusts;
Characterisation of the internal mass distribution, dynamics and evolution of the interiors;
Investigation of the exosphere;
Study of Ganymede's intrinsic magnetic field and its interactions with the Jovian magnetosphere.
For Europa, the focus is on the chemistry essential to life, including organic molecules, and on understanding the formation of surface features and the composition of the non water-ice material. Furthermore, JUICE will provide the first subsurface sounding of the moon, including the first determination of the minimal thickness of the icy crust over the most recently active regions.

NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array)

NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) is a space-based X-ray telescope that uses a Wolter telescope to focus high energy X-rays from astrophysical sources, especially for nuclear spectroscopy, and operates in the range of 5 to 80 keV.[3] It is the eleventh mission of the NASA Small Explorer satellite program (SMEX-11) and the first space-based direct-imaging X-ray telescope at energies beyond those of the Chandra X-ray Observatory and XMM-Newton. It was successfully launched on 13 June 2012, having previously been delayed from 21 March due to software issues with the launch vehicle.

Its primary scientific goals are to conduct a deep survey forblack holes a billion times more massive than the sun, understand how particles are accelerated to within a fraction of a percent below the speed of light in active galaxies, and understand how the elements are created in the explosions of massive stars by imaging the remains, which are called supernova remnants.

Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope

Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is a NASA infrared-wavelength astronomical space telescope active from December 2009 to February 2011. It discovered the first Y Dwarf and Earth trojan, as well as tens of thousands of new asteroids.[1]
It was launched on December 14, 2009,and decommissioned/hibernated on February 17, 2011 when its transmitter was turned off.It performed an all-sky astronomical survey with images in 3.4, 4.6, 12 and 22 μm wavelength range bands, over 10 months using a 40 cm (16 in) diameter infrared telescope in Earth-orbit. In October 2010 its hydrogen coolant was depleted, but a four month mission extension called NEOWISE was conducted to search for small solar system bodies close to Earth's orbit (e.g. hazardous comets and asteroids) using remaining capability.
The All-Sky data were released on 14 March 2012, providing processed images, source catalogs, and raw data to the public.The first Earth Trojan asteroid was discovered using WISE data, announced on July 27, 2011. A new type of star called Y dwarfs were discovered with WISE, announced August 23, 2011, as well as the third closest star system, WISE 1049-5319.

Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array(ALMA)

The Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array  is an array of radio telescopes in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. Since a high and dry site is crucial to millimeter wavelength operations, the array has been constructed on the Chajnantor plateau at 5000 metres altitude. Consisting of 66 12-meter and 7-meter diameter radio telescopes observing at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths, ALMA is expected to provide insight on star birth during the early universe and detailed imaging of local star and planet formation.

ALMA is an international partnership between Europe, the United States, Canada, East Asia and the Republic of Chile. Costing more than a billion US dollars, it is the most expensive ground-based telescope in operation. ALMA began scientific observations in the second half of 2011 and the first images were released to the press on 3 October 2011. The array has been operational since March 2013.


Images from initial testing
By the summer of 2011 sufficient telescopes were operational during the extensive program of testing prior to the Early Science phase for the first images to be captured.These early images give a first glimpse of the potential of the new array that will produce much better quality images in the future as the scale of the array continues to increase.

Antennae galaxy

The target of the observation was a pair of colliding galaxies with dramatically distorted shapes, known as the Antennae Galaxies. Although ALMA did not observe the entire galaxy merger, the result is the best submillimeter-wavelength image ever made of the Antennae Galaxies(a starburst), showing the clouds of dense cold gas from which new stars form, which cannot be seen using visible light.

#Starburst  galaxy--A starburst galaxy is a galaxy undergoing an exceptionally high rate of star formation, as compared to the long term average rate of star formation in the galaxy or the star formation rate observed in most other galaxies.

McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope:largest solar instrument in the world

The McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope is the largest solar instrument in the world.

This is also the world's largest unobstructed aperture optical telescope, with a diameter of 1.6 meters.

Dedicated as the McMath Solar Telescope on November 2, 1962, the facility was later renamed to honor Dr. Keith Pierce as well as Dr. Robert McMath.

The structure includes a tower nearly 100 feet in height from which a shaft slants two hundred feet to the ground. The shaft continues into the mountain, forming an underground tunnel where the sun is viewed at the prime focus. An aerial shot of the top of the McMath-Pierce telescope reveals the 3-mirror heliostat which collects light and directs it down the tunnel. Unlike other solar telescopes, the McMath-Pierce is sensitive enough to observe bright stars in the night.

Permanent instruments include a dual grating spectrograph capable of extended wavelength coverage (0.3-12 microns), a 1-meter Fourier Transform Spectrometer for both solar and laboratory analysis, and a high-dispersion stellar spectrometer.

The McMath-Pierce is used to study the structure of sunspots, as well as sunspot spectra. A sunspot is a temporary cool region in the sun's photosphere. A typical sunspot appears dark and irregularly shaped.

This image of a sunspot with exceptional detail was taken on September 9, 1990, with the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope.The outer diameter of this sun spot measures about 14 thousand miles. Suspended over the umbra, the sunspot's darker inner core, is a rope-like light bridge.

Important discoveries revealed with this telescope include: a detection of water and isotopic helium in the sun; solar emission lines at 12 microns; first measurement of Kilogauss magnetic fields outside sunspots and the very weak intra-network fields; first high resolution images at 1.6 and 10 microns; detection of a natural maser in the Martian atmosphere.

Data archives from the solar telescope are available on the World Wide Web.

The McMath-Pierce Facility is part of the National Solar Observatory, one division of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO).

Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN)

The six science instruments that comprise the Particles and Fields Package that will characterize the solar wind and ionosphere of Mars have been integrated aboard NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft. The spacecraft is on track for launch later this year.

The Solar Wind Electron Analyzer (SWEA) was the last of the six instruments to be delivered, and was integrated late last week at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colo. SWEA measures the properties of electrons at Mars, one electron at a time, and can process up to one million events per second. 

The other instruments in the package had been delivered earlier. In addition to the SWEA instrument, the package includes the Solar Wind Ion Analyzer (SWIA), Suprathermal and Thermal Ion Composition (STATIC), Solar Energetic Particle (SEP), Langmuir Probe and Waves (LPW), Magnetometer (MAG), and a data-processing unit.

"The Particles and Fields Package is designed to study the solar wind interaction with Mars and the structure and dynamics of Mars' ionosphere, including the influence of Mars' strongly magnetized crust," said David L. Mitchell, SWEA instrument lead and coordinator for the full package, from the University of California, Berkeley/Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL). "The package measures solar ultraviolet flux, solar wind properties, and energetic particles produced in solar storms to help us understand how the Sun influences the upper atmosphere and drives atmospheric escape." 

The package was built by the University of California, Berkeley/Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) with support from the University of Colorado Boulder/Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP) and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"The final components of the science payload are coming together, so we’re getting closer to being ready for launch," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator from CU/LASP. "I look forward to the exciting and diverse science results that the Particles and Fields Package instruments will provide.”

The MAVEN spacecraft will carry two other instrument suites. The Remote Sensing Package, built by CU/LASP, will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by NASA Goddard, will measure the composition and isotopes of neutral ions.

“We’re in the home stretch now of completing the assembly and test of the spacecraft. With the full complement of Particles and Fields Package instruments now onboard the spacecraft, we are in a very good position for delivering the spacecraft to the launch site on schedule in August”, said David F. Mitchell, MAVEN project manager from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. 

MAVEN is scheduled for launch in November, 2013. It is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and better understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. MAVEN will investigate the role that loss of Mars' atmosphere to space played in determining the history of water on the surface.

MAVEN’s principal investigator is based at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The university provides science instruments and leads science operations, and Education and Public Outreach. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the project and provides two of the science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colo., built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. The University of California at Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory provides science instruments for the mission. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides navigation support, the Deep Space Network, and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.

Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE)

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the lunar atmosphere, conditions near the surface and environmental influences on lunar dust. A thorough understanding of these characteristics will address long-standing unknowns, and help scientists understand other planetary bodies as well.

The LADEE spacecraft's modular common spacecraft bus, or body, is an innovative way of transitioning away from custom designs and toward multi-use designs and assembly-line production, which could drastically reduce the cost of spacecraft development, just as the Ford Model T did for automobiles.

Onboard, LADEE will include three science instruments and a technology demonstration.

Ultraviolet and Visible Light Spectrometer: will determine the composition of the lunar atmosphere by analyzing light signatures of materials it finds.
Neutral Mass Spectrometer: will measure variations in the lunar atmosphere over multiple lunar orbits with the moon in different space environments.
Lunar Dust Experiment: will collect and analyze samples of any lunar dust particles in the tenuous atmosphere. These measurements will help scientists address a mystery: was lunar dust, electrically charged by solar ultraviolet light, responsible for pre-sunrise horizon glow that Apollo astronauts saw?
Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration: will demonstrate the use of lasers instead of radio waves to achieve broadband speeds to communicate with Earth.

The Birth of Stars and Protoplanetary Systems

Stars, like our Sun, can be thought of as "basic particles" of the Universe, just as atoms are "basic particles" of matter. Groups of stars make up galaxies, while planets and ultimately life arise around stars. Although stars have been the main topic of astronomy for thousands of years, we have begun to understand them in detail only in recent times through the advent of powerful telescopes and computers.

A hundred years ago, scientists did not know that stars are powered by nuclear fusion, and 50 years ago they did not know that stars are continually forming in the Universe. Researchers still do not know the details of how clouds of gas and dust collapse to form stars, or why most stars form in groups, or exactly how planetary systems form. Young stars within a star-forming region interact with each other in complex ways. The details of how they evolve and release the heavy elements they produce back into space for recycling into new generations of stars and planets remains to be determined through a combination of observation and theory.

The stages of solar system formation, starting with a protostar embedded in a gas cloud (upper left of below diagram), to an early star with a circumstellar disk (upper right), to a star surrounded by small "planetesimals" which are starting to clump together (lower left) to a solar system like ours today.

Astronomers know that a large number of stars that are like our Sun have gas-giant planets. The number of confirmed planets and candidate planets is now in the thousands.  Many of these exoplanets are very large (like Jupiter), but smaller planets nearer to Earth's size are also being discovered.

The continual discovery of new and unusual planetary systems has made scientists re-think their ideas and theories about how planets are formed. Scientists realize that to get a better understanding of how planets form, they need to have more observations of planets around young stars, and more observations of leftover debris around stars, which can come together and form planets.

To unravel the birth and early evolution of stars and planets, we need to be able to peer into the hearts of dense and dusty cloud cores where star formation begins. These regions cannot be observed at visible light wavelengths as the dust would make such regions opaque and must be observed at infrared wavelengths.

The James Webb Space Telescope's superior imaging and spectroscopy capabilities will allow us to study stars as they are forming in their dusty cocoons. It will also be able to image disks around stars and study organic molecules that are important for life to develop.

James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope is a large space telescope, optimized for infrared wavelengths. It is scheduled for launch later in this decade. Webb will find the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy. Webb will peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System. Webb's instruments will be designed to work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range.

Webb will have a large mirror, 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in diameter, and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. The mirror and sunshade won't fit into a rocket fully open, so both will be folded and open once Webb is in outer space. Webb will reside in an orbit about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from the Earth at the second Lagrange point.

The James Webb Space Telescope was named after a former NASA Administrator.

This is another milestone that helps move Webb closer to its launch date in 2018," said Geoff Yoder, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope program director, NASA Headquarters, Washington.

Designed, built and set to be tested by ATK at its facilities in Magna, Utah, the wing assemblies are extremely complex, with 900 separate parts made of lightweight graphite composite materials using advanced fabrication techniques. ATK assembled the wing assemblies like a puzzle with absolute precision. ATK and teammate Northrop Grumman of Redondo Beach, Calif., completed the fabrication.

"We will measure the accuracy down to nanometers -- it will be an incredible engineering and manufacturing challenge," said Bob Hellekson, ATK's Webb Telescope program manager. "With all the new technologies that have been developed during this program, the Webb telescope has helped advance a whole new generation of highly skilled ATK engineers, scientists and craftsmen while helping the team create a revolutionary telescope."

When fully assembled, the primary mirror backplane support structure will measure about 24 feet by 21 feet and weigh more than 2,000 pounds. The backplane must be very stable, both structurally and thermally, so it does not introduce changes in the primary mirror shape, and holds the instruments in a precise position with respect to the telescope. While the telescope is operating at a range of extremely cold temperatures, from minus 406 to minus 360 degrees Fahrenheit, the backplane must not vary more than 38 nanometers (about one one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair). The thermal stability requirements for the backplane are unprecedented.

"Our ATK teammates demonstrated the thermal stability on test articles before building the wing assemblies with the same design, analysis, and manufacturing techniques. One of the test articles ATK built and tested is actually larger than a wing," said Charlie Atkinson, deputy Webb Optical Telescope Element manager for Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, Calif. "The mirrors are attached to the wings, as well as the rest of the backplane support structure, so the alignment is critical. If the wings distort, then the mirror distorts, and the images formed by the telescope would be distorted."

The James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. It will be the most powerful space telescope ever built and observe the most distant objects in the universe, provide images of the first galaxies formed and see unexplored planets around distant stars. The Webb telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

IRIS project -:Small Explorer (SMEX) mission

NASA's next Small Explorer (SMEX) mission to study the little-understood lower levels of the sun's atmosphere has been fully integrated and final testing is underway.Scheduled to launch in April 2013, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) will make use of high-resolution images, data and advanced computer models to unravel how matter, light, and energy move from the sun’s 6,000 K (10,240 F / 5,727 C) surface to its million K (1.8 million F / 999,700 C) outer atmosphere, the corona. Such movement ultimately heats the sun's atmosphere to temperatures much hotter than the surface, and also powers solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can have societal and economic impacts on Earth."This is the first time we'll be directly observing this region since the 1970s," says Joe Davila, IRIS project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're excited to bring this new set of observations to bear on the continued question of how the corona gets so hot."A fundamentally mysterious region that helps drive heat into the corona, the lower levels of the atmosphere -- namely two layers called the chromosphere and the transition region -- have been notoriously hard to study. IRIS will be able to tease apart what's happening there better than ever before by providing observations to pinpoint physical forces at work near the surface of the sun.The mission carries a single instrument: an ultraviolet telescope combined with an imaging spectrograph that will both focus on the chromosphere and the transition region. The telescope will see about one percent of the sun at a time and resolve that image to show features on the sun as small as 150 miles (241.4 km) across. The instrument will capture a new image every five to ten seconds, and spectra about every one to two seconds. Spectra will cover temperatures from 4,500 K to 10,000,000 K (7,640 F/4,227 C to 18 million F/10 million C), with images covering temperatures from 4,500 K to 65,000 K (116,500 F/64,730 C).These unique capabilities will be coupled with state of the art 3-D numerical modeling on supercomputers, such as Pleiades, housed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Indeed, recent improvements in computer power to analyze the large amount of data is crucial to why IRIS will provide better information about the region than ever seen before.“The interpretation of the IRIS spectra is a major effort coordinated by the IRIS science team that will utilize the full extent of the power of the most advanced computational resources in the world. It is this new capability, along with development of state of the art codes and numerical models by the University of Oslo that captures the complexities of this region, which make the IRIS mission possible. Without these important elements we would be unable to fully interpret the IRIS spectra,” said Alan Title, the IRIS principal investigator at the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif.

The IRIS observatory will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and will fly in a sun-synchronous polar orbit for continuous solar observations during a two-year mission.

IRIS was designed and built at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems ATC in Palo Alto, Calif., with support from the company’s Civil Space line of business and major partners Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Montana State University. Ames is responsible for mission operations and the ground data system. The Norwegian Space Agency will provide the primary ground station at Svalbard, Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. The science data will be managed by the Joint Science Operations Center, run by Stanford and Lockheed Martin. Goddard oversees the SMEX program.

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InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport)

InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is a NASA Discovery Program mission that would place a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior. But InSight is more than a Mars mission - it is a terrestrial planet explorer that would address one of the most fundamental issues of planetary and solar system science - understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago.
By using sophisticated geophysical instruments, InSight would delve deep beneath the surface of Mars, detecting the fingerprints of the processes of terrestrial planet formation, as well as measuring the planet's "vital signs": Its "pulse" (seismology), "temperature" (heat flow probe), and "reflexes" (precision tracking)



Why Mars?

Previous missions to Mars have investigated the surface history of the Red Planet by examining features like canyons, volcanoes, rocks and soil, but no one has attempted to investigate the planet's earliest evolution - its building blocks - which can only be found by looking far below the surface.