The International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) is the first telescope of its kind in India, the largest in Asia, and made solely for astronomical surveys.įirst light for the telescope was in June, 2022. It is located at an altitude of 8,000 feet. Built by astronomers from India, Belgium and Canada, the novel instrument employs a 4-meter-diameter rotating mirror made up of a thin film of liquid mercury to collect and focus light. A unique liquid-mirror telescope now sits atop a mountain in the Himalayan range at the Devasthal Observatory. With evolving technology however, old ideas become practical. You can also only look straight up at the zenith as the liquid and its container need to spin evenly with the assist of gravity. Vibrations will cause ripples in the liquid and even wind passing over the liquid will disturb it. Conceptually simple but many factors impeded actual performance. There have been attempts since Newton published his paper to create a telescope with a liquid mirror. Primary telescope mirrors are usually in the shape of a parabola as this reflects light onto a point, the focus of the parabola. take a (circular) container of liquid, spin it around its central axis and the liquid will take the shape of a parabola. In 1686, Isaac Newton said, a spinning "vessel, by gradually communicating its motion to the water, will make it begin sensibly to revolve, and recede by little and little from the middle, and ascend to the sides of the vessel, forming itself into a concave figure." I.e. "We are going to take our time before we draw any scientific conclusions, but until then we can simply marvel at this celestial wonder, the only moon in our solar system bigger than the planet Mercury.First Light for the International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT). "This is the closest any spacecraft has come to this mammoth moon in a generation," Bolton said. The camera's point of view for the animation was generated by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt, using composite images of the planet and its moon. NASA's animation team also simulated lightning that would be visible if you were actually viewing one of Jupiter's thunderstorms in person. The flyby was the first close-up look at the big moon since NASA's Galileo orbiter flew past for the last time in 2000. Today, as we approach the exciting prospect of humans being able to visit space in orbit around Earth, this propels our imagination decades into the future, when humans will be visiting the alien worlds in our solar system." NASA's Juno spacecraft captured high-resolution views of Jupiter's moon Ganymede during a flyby in June 2021 at an altitude of about 645 miles. "The animation is a way for people to imagine exploring our solar system firsthand by seeing what it would be like to be orbiting Jupiter and flying past one of its icy moons. "The animation shows just how beautiful deep space exploration can be," Scott Bolton, principal investigator for Juno, said in a statement. Visible from that perspective are the cyclones at the gas giant's north pole, as well as five "string of pearls" - gigantic storms spinning in the southern hemisphere, appearing as white ovals.
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