The Hubble Telescope is basically a deep space camera. It flies around the earth at insane speeds, taking pictures of other galaxies. It has provided man kind with an insane amount of information about space. Launched on April 4th, 1990, the Hubble telescope has taken some astounding pictures. The Hubble Telescope travels through the earths orbit at 4.66 miles per second (about 7.62 kilometers per second). That's insane. If anything traveled that fast within our atmosphere, it would disintegrate because of heat generated by friction with air. A group of scientists are developing a new telescope, and it's called the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). It's composed of 7 geometrically place parabolic mirrors with a camera raised in the center of it. It is estimated to be able to take pictures up to 25 light years away, with 10 times the resolution as the Hubble Telescope. Imagine this: But 10 times as clear. We could zoom in on the picture, and make out planets and maybe even evidence of other life. That is the design for the GMT. That may look small, but to be functional and protected from the elements, it would need to be inside a 22 story tall building. And on top of that, the building needs to be able to rotate. Imagine that. A 220 foot tall building, on top of a large hill, just spinning in circles. That's 1 mirror being produced. Each mirror is a kind of like a sphere getting cut. A parabola is basically and arched line. So a parabolic mirror, is basically a big bowl shaped mirror. And there's seven of these being places around 1 center one, bouncing images of space to the camera. The reason behind the parabolic shape of the mirrors is to create focal points. This is how the pictures are taken with such high resolution. These mirrors weigh 22 tons each. And there's 7 of them. So, not including frame work, that's 154 tons of glass sitting inside of a 220 foot tall spinning building, on a hill, taking pictures 25 light years away. What is a light year? Well, here's the definition. Light Year: a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, which is 9.4607 × 1012 km (nearly 6 trillion miles). 6 trillion miles is 1 light year (the distance of the speed of light traveled over 1 year). So this GMT can accurately take pictures over 125 trillion miles away. And that's just a radius. So essentially, it has a diameter range of 250 trillion miles. Now, if you want to get into area, it's 785398000000000000 m^2. That's ridiculous. I don't know what to think. So much space that we can photograph. Surely, we can find other life. We can take pictures of whoever they might be and stalk them until we can get to the point where we can travel fast enough to reach them in a life time. Technology is ridiculously advanced.
I saw a video today about parabolic mirrors being made with mercury being spun in bowls. It was really cool, and I was browsing related videos and saw this. I've spent most of my day researching it. It's insane.
If I'm not too lazy I'll try to post some pics as well. Dome pretty awesome ones out there. A lot clearer since you aren't looking through the atmosphere
For all you Americans that are too lazy to do 4.66 times 60 times 60, that's 16,776 miles per hour (mph)
The story behind the original launch, the faults and fixes of the Hubble is worth reading up on. One of NASA's biggest screwup's and great triumphs. Completely impossible with out the now defunct space shuttle program.