CELESTIAL OR
SPACE BASED TELESCOPES 
MENU
- HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE
- CHANDRA X-RAY TELESCOPE
- XMM X-RAY TELESCOPE
- EUROPEAN INFRARED TELESCOPE
- EUROPEAN WEATHER SATELLITE
- SOHO IN ORBIT AROUND THE SUN
- GAMMA-RAY LARG AREA SPACE TELESCOPE
Below described professional instruments belong to the class of the most sophisticated photograph devices and telescopes of our time.
Click with your mouse on the picture to
get a larger picture (© NASA).
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a 2.4 meter (in diameter) mirror telescope, which is revolving around the earth in a satellite orbit since 1990. The energy is generated by means of two very large solar arrays of 2.4 m. x 12.1 m each. Because the missing of an atmosphere on this altitude above the surface of the earth and lacking of earthly light sources, it is possible to make very sharp photographs of moons, planets, stars, gas and dust nebulae and distant star systems.
(© NASA)
Further technical information and pictures are to find at the NASA HST Site.
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CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY (CXO)
Click with your mouse on the picture to
get a larger picture (© NASA).
Click with your mouse on the picture to
get a larger picture (© NASA).
More technical information and pictures are to find at the NASA CXO Site.
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X-RAY MULTIMIRROR MISSION (XMM)
A worthy successor of Chandra is the XMM telescope, launched by the ESA at 9 December 1999. This X-ray telescope is the largest in its sort, in a housing with a length of 10 meters and a diameter of 4.5 meters. The span of the two solar arrays amounts to 16 meters. The telescope can make images in simple visible light, ultraviolet light and X-ray light (soft and hard X-radiation). We see below an impression of an artist, concerning XMM (in the middle) and the Andromeda Nebulae seen in X-ray (above) and normal light (under).
Click with your mouse on the picture to
get a larger picture (© ESA).
The XMM telescope will revolve in a very high elliptic orbit in 48 hours around our earth. The time of duration is valued on ten years. Further technical information and pictures are to find at the ESA XMM Homepage.
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INFRARED SPACE OBSERVATORY (ISO)
Click with your mouse on the
picture to get a larger picture (©
ESA).
(© ESA)
More technical information and images can be found at the ESA ISO Site.
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Our largest and best interplanetary weather station
is SOHO an unmanned space station in a satellite orbit around the sun. The station is doing observations of the sun
and interplanetary space. The sun
is constantly watched and at the right time warnings for magnetic storms arrive to the earth. These storms can be very dangerous also for astronauts in an orbit around the earth on
account of very strong X-ray radiation.
SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) was
launched in1995 as a common project of NASA and ESA. SOHO has an ultraviolet telescope and many other instruments for detecting all kinds of radiation and particles.More about this on the web page for Space Weather
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The European satellite Meteosat hangs quietly at 36,000 km altitude above the Gold Coast (Africa) at the cross point of the equator and the Greenwich zero-meridian and makes photographs of the for him visible part (approximately a third) of the surface of the earth.
The area what is important for us, namely Europe and nearest surroundings, is each half hour photographed. The photographs can be shown by the computer after each other in the form of a small movie. The last received photograph is always added to the small movie and the first is removed. By making the recordings for the small movie in the infrared light are also for the nocturnal hours photographs available. Also give these photographs information about the temperatures of the surface of the earth.
(© EUMETSAT)
We can look at the images at the Belgian KMI Meteosat Site and also with technical data at the German DWD Eumetsat Site. Also we find pictures and small movies on the English site Meteosat images of the University or Nottingham (24 hour slide show). Special is the Animation of the Solar Eclipse 11-8-1999 composed by images of Meteosat.
Back to MENUGAMMA-RAY LARGE AREA SPACE TELESCOPE (GLAST)
GLAST is designed to probe the most violent events and exotic objects in the
cosmos from gamma-ray bursts to black holes and beyond. The launch is scheduled for May
16, 2008.
With GLAST, astronomers will at long last have a superior tool to study how black holes, notorious for pulling matter in, can accelerate jets of gas outward at fantastic speeds. Physicists will be able to study subatomic particles at energies far greater than those seen in ground-based particle accelerators. And cosmologists will gain valuable information about the birth and early evolution of the Universe.
This satellite still needs a name. You can propose a name via the NASA website Name That Satellite. I proposed as new name 'Gamov Telescope', because George Gamov was the champion of the big bang theory, whereby the universe originates from a particular situation in space and time (super gamma flash).
Further technical information is to find at the official NASA GLAST Website.
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== 2 CELESTIAL TELESCOPES - SPACE BASED
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