NEWSNOTES
NASA (2)
Proposed designs for Hubble’s successor, the Next Generation Space Telescope, by Lockheed Martin (left) and TRW/Ball Aerospace (right). The
current plans call for an 8-meter telescope behind a tennis-court-size Sun shield.
Next Generation Space Telescope on the Fast Track
America’s highest-priority big-astronomy program for
the next decade will be the Next Generation Space Telescope
(NGST), designed to pick up where the Hubble Space Tele-
scope left off. The NGST’s 8-meter segmented primary mirror
will be slightly more than three times larger than Hubble’s 2.4-
meter aperture. The NGST will work mainly in the infrared at
wavelengths of approximately 0.6 to 10 microns, where most of
the action lies for cosmologists looking back to the early uni-
verse at very high redshifts. Currently scheduled for launch in
2009, NGST is still very much in the preliminary design stages,
and most of its contracts have yet to be assigned.
Two contractors, TRW/Ball Aerospace and Lockheed Mar-
tin, are the primary competitors bidding to build the NGST.
While both teams have displayed rough prototypes, neither has
revealed details about its designs. Those will be announced
after the final contract is awarded in July 2001. So far, only the
most basic specifications have been made public.
Unlike HST, which is in Earth orbit, NGST will orbit the L2
Lagrangian point — a region of gravitational stability in the
Earth-Sun system 1.6 million kilometers behind Earth. Here
the telescope can operate unimpeded by the Earth blocking
half of the sky or by the Earth’s heat radiation — a problem
for any sensitive infrared telescope in Earth orbit. However,
the L2 location does have its downside: it is far beyond the
Space Shuttle’s reach, making NGST unserviceable by astro-
nauts if any problems occur. “We’ve got to get it right,” re-
marks John Mather (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center),
NGST project scientist.
Unlike conventional telescopes or even HST, NGST will have
26 September 2000 Sky & Telescope ©2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
no tube. Both the Lockheed Martin and TRW/Ball plans call
for a completely exposed primary mirror shaded by a tennis-
court-size Sun shield that will keep the telescope dark and cold
(50° Kelvin). But even this plan has its potential problems. En-
gineers are unclear exactly how such a large Sun shield will be-
have in space. One concern is that the shield may become a
solar sail — pushed by photons and solar-wind particles much
the way wind pushes a ship’s sail on Earth. The slightest torque
could be devastating to a telescope that will have to hold its
aim to a few thousandths of an arcsecond for long exposures.
With these concerns in mind, NASA plans to test a prototype
Sun shield from the Space Shuttle’s cargo bay in 2001.
NGST will also require a host of other new technologies.
Most of these will be demonstrated by a proof-of-concept mis-
sion named Nexus, a one-third scale model of NGST sched-
uled for launch to the L2 position in October 2004. Nexus will
house a 2.5-meter primary mirror, slightly larger than Hub-
ble’s. However, Nexus is not being sent to do science. Its goal is
simply to prove that the NGST technologies will work.
The only instrument onboard Nexus will be a single camera
with a field of view less than 1 arcminute wide. And as deputy
project scientist Richard Burg is quick to point out, “Engineer-
ing, not science, will dictate the requirements for the camera.”
The instrument will observe only a limited number of targets.
Despite the scientific potential of such a telescope, Burg insists
that the $200 million mission will remain a technology
demonstration platform only. “It is difficult to expand Nexus
without putting pressure on the NGST schedule. The techno-
logical validation is primary.”