New space camera provides quick results
Advertiser Staff
HILO, Hawai'i — University of Hawai'i astronomers last week released the first image from a 16-megapixel infrared camera recently mounted on UH's 30-year-old telescope on Mauna Kea.
The new camera provides a 16-fold increase in sky coverage and much higher sensitivity than the 1-megapixel cameras in widespread use on telescopes for the past decade, making the 88-inch UH telescope the most powerful in the world for infrared imaging, according to a UH announcement.
The new technology was developed by the UH Institute for Astronomy and the Rockwell Scientific Co. in Camarillo, Calif., using a $7 million grant from the NASA Ames Research Center. During a four-year development program, the team created 4-megapixel chips nearly 2-by-2-inches in size, some of the largest ever produced.
In partnership with GL Scientific, a small business in Honolulu, the team devised an innovative way to mount the 4-megapixel chips to create a 16-megapixel camera. This technique will allow for even larger cameras in the future, the UH announcement said.
The infrared camera was developed to meet the requirements of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration's James Webb Space Telescope, planned for launch within 10 years. The telescope, which will have six times the collecting area of the Hubble Space Telescope, will be put into an orbit far beyond the moon where it will cool to temperatures of minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing for extremely sensitive infrared observations.
UH team leader Don Hall, former director of the Institute for Astronomy, said most complex instruments require a "debugging" period, but the new infrared camera on the UH telescope produced data on its first night.
The galaxy imaged, NGC 891, is in the constellation Andromeda about 10 million light years from Earth.
Richard Wainscoat, who is analyzing the image, said that with smaller cameras, galaxies such as NGC 891 must be imaged in postage-stamp-sized sections that have to be pieced together. The new camera allows astronomers to image very large areas of the sky, making it easier to detect more distant galaxies, he said.
Plans call for 16-megapixel infrared cameras to be installed on both the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope and the Gemini Telescopes atop Mauna Kea.
Rockwell Scientific has orders for several other cameras for telescopes in Chile, the UH announcement said.
