NASA Is Studying How To Replace Mirrors In Its Telescopes With Glitter

NASA Is Studying How to Replace Mirrors in Its Telescopes With Glitter

Space telescope Hubble and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope are made with huge, expensive mirrors. And that can be a problem when you're paying to launch the thing into space. So instead of one big mirror, how about thousands — or even millions — of tiny ones? In other words, how about glitter?

Orbiting Rainbows is in fact a very real system being considered by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A telescope reflecting light with glitter clouds could potentially be a lot cheaper than the $US8.7 billion James Webb Space Telescope.




The last step is really the key. Images reflected off of glitter will always be distorted, so scientists will need a lot of computational power to figure out what they're supposed to see. Orbiting Rainbows does away with the challenge of manufacturing a huge mirror, but it creates a whole new computational challenge.



NASA Is Studying How to Replace Mirrors in Its Telescopes With Glitter


Pictures: G. Swartzlander/Rochester Institute of Technology

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