Sky and Telescope - June 2016 - 12

News Notes

IN BRIEF

NASA / GSFC

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration
Agency's (JAXA's) new X-ray observatory
launched into orbit on February 17th.
Formerly known as NEXT (New X-ray
Telescope) and then as Astro H, Hitomi
(meaning "pupil of the eye"), joins six
other X-ray space observatories in studying the hot and violent universe. More

X-ray telescopes nest many mirrors inside
one another, like the layers of an onion, each
one almost parallel to arriving radiation. The
mirror assemblies for Hitomi's two Soft X-ray
Telescopes (one show above) each contain 203
concentric shells of aluminum segments. The
cylinder is 45 centimeters (17.7 inches) across.

than 250 scientists from 61 countries
collaborated on it.
The observatory will measure X-ray
energies from 300 to 600,000 electron
volts (0.3 to 600 keV). For comparison,
the Chandra X-ray Observatory covers 0.1
to 10 keV and the Nuclear Spectroscopic
Telescope Array (NUSTAR) 3 to 79 keV.
Hitomi sports four X-ray telescopes,
two for "soft" (low-energy) photons and
two for "hard" (high-energy) ones. These
direct X-rays to various imagers and a
spectrometer, the latter of which will
precisely measure soft X-rays' energies.
"It will be the only X-ray observatory
to offer both capabilities [seeing lowenergy and high-energy X-rays] at the
same time for every observation," says
Laura Brenneman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics). The primary mission is slated for three years.
Circling at an altitude of 575 km in
an orbit very similar to Hubble's, the
hulking satellite should be visible from
latitudes within 40°° of the equator.

12

June 2016 sky & telescope

Solar System Stamps. The U.S. Postal
Service has unveiled three sets of new
stamps that celebrate the solar system
and NASA's exploration thereof. The ones
likely to draw most interest involve Pluto
and NASA's New Horizons mission (shown
above), which supersede a USPS stamp
issued in 1991 that labels Pluto as "not yet
explored." The Postal Service is also releasing a commemorative sheet of stamps with
images of the eight planets from Mercury
to Neptune. A third new release involves
circular stamps showing a rising full Moon,
captured by Florida photographer Beth
Swanson, that cost $1.20 each and can be
used to mail letters internationally. All three
sets should be available by June.
■ J. KELLY BEATTY

■ DAVID DICKINSON

MISSIONS I WFIRST: Next Decade's Space Telescope
On February 18th and after several
years of design studies, NASA
announced it is commencing work on
the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope
(WFIRST), the successor to the Hubble
and James Webb space telescopes.
WFIRST will incorporate one of the
two 2.4-m mirrors donated to NASA in
2011 by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (S&T: Sept. 2012, p. 14). The
mirror is comparable in size to Hubble's
primary but, thanks to its faster focal
ratio (f/7.8 compared with Hubble's
f/24), will have a field of view 100 times
larger in area. However, its resolution
will be less sharp than Webb's, and
Webb will peer deeper into the universe.
Although the ready-made "spy" mirror speeds development, a significant
amount of time and money will still go
into instrumentation. The mission is set
to launch in the mid-2020s.

USPS / ANTONIO ALCALÁ

MISSIONS I New X-ray Observatory Launches

Originally conceived as the Joint Dark
Energy Mission, WFIRST was the No. 1
mission on the astronomy community's
decadal survey wish list. The two main
themes it will address are dark energy
and exoplanets. Its wide-field imager
will search for Type Ia supernovae and
gravitationally lensed galaxies in an effort
to better understand cosmic expansion,
complementing the upcoming European
Space Agency's Euclid mission.
On the other hand, the telescope's
coronagraphic imager will home in on
large, close-orbiting exoplanets to reveal
their atmospheres and compositions,
complementing space- and groundbased direct-imaging projects.
■ DAVID DICKINSON

Learn more about the mission and
watch a recent Google Hangout with
some of WFIRST's key players: http://
is.gd/wfirstago.

Repeating Radio Signal from Space.
Laura Spitler (Max Planck Institute for Radio
Astronomy, Germany) and colleagues report
in the March 10th Nature their discovery
of the first repeating fast radio burst (FRB).
FRBs are millisecond flashes that seem
to come from outside the Milky Way, but
astronomers have struggled to explain
their origin for nearly a decade. The team
detected a powerful burst washing over
Earth in November 2012, followed by two
more on May 17, 2015, and eight more on
June 2, 2015 - all from the same patch of
sky and at the same distance. That the blast
repeats "tells you without a doubt that this
is not a cataclysmic event like a core-collapse
supernova or a neutron star-neutron star
merger, because that kind of event destroys
the object," says coauthor Jason Hessels
(Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy).
Spitler speculates that the repeating FRB
might point to a new, energetic class of pulsars. S&T will have an in-depth discussion of
FRBs in an upcoming issue.
■ SHANNON HALL


http://www.is.gd/wfirstago http://www.is.gd/wfirstago

Sky and Telescope - June 2016

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