What used to be two spy telescopes from one of America’s premier intelligence agencies will now be used by NASA in order to launch a heavy research on dark energy. While these massive machines have the same resolution as the well known Hubble Space Telescope, they happen to possess a field of view that’s 200 times wider than it.
NASA wants to use the two telescopes to find out the secrets about the ever so mysterious dark energy that makes up more than 68 per cent of the universe. It is this energy that is responsible for accelerating the unstoppable expansion of the universe.
A senior official revealed to Space.com that NASA is planning to request state funding in next year’s budget in order to begin using the two space telescopes. These were granted to it by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) back in 2012.
The space mission in which they could be used is apparently named WFIRST-AFTA (the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets), and is slated to be launched in 2024. Once the program gets underway, one among the two telescopes will be used for observations of dark energy, whereas the other one will remain the ground to act as an engineering test bed.
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NASA’s Paul Hertz has disclosed that the space organization plans to use the two telescopes without making any modifications to them. However, a resurfacing of their mirrors will be needed, due to the fact that they have been sitting in storage since a long time.
This NASA mission sure seems like a promising one, and it’s something that will definitely intrigue space enthusiasts since the mystery surrounding dark energy could finally be solved at least to some extent.