A revolutionary telescope developed by a team of students from the University of Sheffield is set to capture new images of the sun in a NASA launch.
Images captured by the instrument, which has been designed by science and engineering students at the university, could be used to help improve forecasting of solar activity – major energetic events from the sun that can pose significant risks to human health, power grids and space assets.
Built using novel manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing, the telescope’s design could revolutionise solar observational technology.
Current Earth-based solar telescopes are expensive, in part because there needs to be a significant investment in mirrors and other hardware to obtain scientific quality images of the sun.
Launching into space later this year, the telescope is the only instrument from outside of the US that has been selected to be on NASA’s High Altitude Student Platform (HASP) – a zero pressure balloon supported by NASA and the Louisiana Space Consortium.
The balloon flies once a year from New Mexico, in the USA, and carries equipment to an altitude of around 36 kilometres for more than 10 hours.
The low cost solar observation system developed by the Sheffield students can operate completely autonomously. It will use the high altitude balloon to lift the solar telescope above the interference of the Earth’s lower atmosphere to observe the sun in the H-alpha spectral line – a particular wavelength of light emitted by the sun that astronomers and solar physicists can use to observe the sun’s chromosphere.
The team hopes their system will capture interesting features, such as solar flares – radiation and particles capable of penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere. Solar prominences – clouds of plasma that can be used to help visualise the sun’s magnetic field lines, but are often difficult for researchers to capture, could also be photographed by the telescope.
It is hoped the telescope can improve sun-tracking, image collection systems and obtain full disk images of the sun.
Roisin Clear, a Masters student in Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, has been working on the telescope, which is named Project SunbYte. She said: “Being involved in the SunbYte project has been a fantastic experience so far and I’m hoping that it’s going to get even better.
“It has taken a lot of hard work to get to the point of having our instrument selected for a balloon flight with NASA, however I have learned a lot since I’ve started and I’ve had the chance to meet lots of fellow space enthusiasts.
“Taking images in the far-red part of the spectrum will allow us to see the detail that would be lost in a full-spectrum image. Hopefully the resulting images will be of interest to those exploring space weather and solar physics.”