Why NASA named its Artificial Star mission ‘Landolt’
NASA has named its Artificial Star project the Landolt Mission after Arlo Landolt, the late astronomer and pioneer of stellar brightness catalogs
Washington: American space agency NASA has announced a new space mission to launch an ‘Artificial Star’ named after famed American astronomer Arlo Landolt.
The NASA 'star' to twinkle like other stars in the sky will be operated upon by ground control unit stationed in George Mason University in the state of Virginia.
The NASA artificial star will be launched into Earth’s orbit by 2029. It will be invisible with naked eyes and stargazers will require telescope to catch its glimpses.
NASA said the aim behind launching the artificial star is to determine more accurately the absolute flux calibration of stars, also known as their brightness.
NASA has named this new space project the Landolt Mission after Arlo Landolt, the late astronomer and pioneer of stellar brightness catalogs.
Who was Arlo Landolt?
Known for his widely used photometric standards, American astronomer Arlo Landolt served on committees with many organizations and was eventually elected Secretary of the American Astronomical Society and remained on the post for three consecutive terms.
Landort also worked for the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C for one year.
Landolt’s worked principally in photometry. He published a number of widely used lists of standard stars.
He put together widely used catalogs of stellar brightness from 1970s through the 1990s.
More about NASA artificial star
As part of its Landolt Mission, NASA will launch a light into the sky in 2029 with a known emission rate of photons, and the team will observe it next to real stars to make new stellar brightness catalogs.
The artificial star will actually be a satellite and will have eight lasers shining at ground optical telescopes in order to calibrate them for observations. The effort will not make the artificial stars so bright to see with the naked eye.
“This mission is focused on measuring fundamental properties that are used daily in astronomical observations,” said Eliad Peretz, NASA Goddard mission and instrument scientist and Landolt’s deputy principal investigator.
“It might impact and change the way we measure or understand the properties of stars, surface temperatures, and the habitability of exoplanets”, he added.
The artificial star will be placed 35,785 kilometres above Earth, far enough away to look like a star to telescopes back on Earth. This orbit also allows it to move at the same speed of the Earth’s rotation, keeping it in place over the United States during its first year in space.
“This is what is considered an infrastructure mission for NASA, supporting the science in a way that we’ve known we needed to do, but with a transformative change in how we do it,” Plavchan explained.
To be about the size of a loaf of bread, the satellite will be built in partnership with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a world leader in measuring photon emissions.
The Landolt Space Mission is a breakthrough in space exploration. As a more constant and well-known sky 'landmark' it will allow scientists to better calibrate their methods and secure more exact data with every observation -- effectively revealing more of the mystery of the cosmos, according to George Mason University.
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