Supply
The University of Canterbury Mount John Observatory above Lake Tekapo.
Tekapo, home to New Zealand’s largest telescope, has just become the site of a new research collaboration with the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has signed an agreement with Nasa that has enabled a collaboration between the Nasa Capstone mission team and a University of Canterbury-led research team.
“Mount John Observatory (which overlooks Tekapo and is owned by the University of Canterbury) is the largest observatory in New Zealand, and it has the largest telescopes,” said Stephen Weddell, UC’s electrical and computer engineering academic associate professor.
The UC team seeks to help validate a research approach to create a sislunar space situational awareness capability – which is a way to detect spacecraft orbiting the Moon or between high Earth orbit and the Moon.
READ MORE:
* James Webb Space Telescope reaches endpoint one million miles from Earth
* Web space telescope evades ‘single-point failures’ while tennis court-size sunscreen deploys
* New space telescope explodes, begins mission to scan the cosmos and look back in time
“This detection will become increasingly important as more countries and private actors send spacecraft to the moon,” a UC press release said.
“At the most basic level, we see space debris,” Weddell said.
“Nobody wants their lunar mission to be hit by space debris moving faster than a fast bullet in a low-Earth orbit. In a collision, it could cause significant damage to a satellite and other spacecraft.
“Our method is based on photometry and uses specialized instrumentation, such as adaptive optics, to explore the extent to which we can use the natural properties of light and maximize the ability of our optical telescope at the Mount John Observatory.”
“… we want as much magnification as we can to see these objects.”
The UC-led research team, which includes academics from the universities of Auckland and New South Wales, will try to locate the spacecraft from the Mt John Observatory and the UNSW Observatory in Canberra, Australia.
The research team of seven is led by Weddell, who said he feels “fairly privileged to be part of this program”.
“Being able to contribute to this epic project is just fantastic.”
Bejon Haswell / Stuff
The University of Canterbury Mount John Observatory at Tekapo. (File photo)
Weddell and his team, made up of academics from the universities of Auckland and New South Wales and postgraduate students build instrumentation around the exact location of Capstone, a capsule made by Rocket Lab in its orbit around the Moon, detect and make cislunar [between earth and the moon] observations. The Rocket Lab capsule is a “big first step” after humans’ return to the moon.
“It is a tool we are developing that will be able to determine the position of a spacecraft that is far from Earth.
“We build instrumentation that essentially depends on the back of the telescope, we point the telescope in the direction Nasa or Rocket Lab tell us to point, and then we try to pick up the location more accurately than we would if we could. it depicts. ”
Weddell said taking photos does not work so well for cisl observations because the light from the moon disrupts the photo.
“The big problem with the Moon is that it emits a lot of light.
“By using instrumentation we can get a much more accurate idea of where the object is positioned.”
The university will begin their immediate observations when the Capstone orbits the moon, which according to Weddell will take several months.