New keen-sighted satellite will view distant stars, assist Webb telescope

NASA’s James Webb House Telescope (JWST), probably the most highly effective telescope ever launched into space, will quickly get a brand new “sidekick”—a small however nimble satellite that borrows its title from a multicolored sea creature.

Final month, NASA chosen the $8.5 million space mission, which is named Monitoring Exercise from Close by sTars with uv Imaging and Spectroscopy (MANTIS). This CubeSat, or mini-satellite, will likely be concerning the dimension of a toaster oven and will likely be designed and constructed on the Laboratory for Atmospheric and House Physics (LASP) on the College of Colorado Boulder.

Its moniker comes from the mantis shrimp, a crustacean identified for its highly effective punches and much more unimaginable eyesight. Like that undersea animal, the MANTIS spacecraft will be capable to observe the night time sky within the full vary of ultraviolet mild. That features an particularly energetic type of radiation known as excessive ultraviolet (EUV) mild.

“No spacecraft has noticed the total EUV spectrum from stars aside from the sun since about 2001,” mentioned Briana Indahl, a analysis scientist at LASP and principal investigator for the MANTIS mission.

The spacecraft will use its spectacular imaginative and prescient to assist the Webb telescope, which launched in 2021, in its mission to discover the atmospheres of “exoplanets” past Earth’s solar system. MANTIS, Indahl defined, will observe the risky physics of stars burning dozens of light-years from Earth, together with as they eject enormous bursts of vitality within the type of flares. Information from the craft will complement Webb’s personal observations of exoplanets, serving to scientists piece collectively the situations that would make these worlds liveable—or not.

“We proposed MANTIS as a form of ultraviolet sidekick that may comply with JWST and look wherever it is wanting, filling on this necessary piece of context on the stellar environments through which these planets reside,” mentioned Kevin France, an affiliate professor at LASP and scientist on the MANTIS staff.

Indahl and her colleagues will quickly start work on MANTIS, which is scheduled to launch in 2026 and can spend a couple of 12 months accumulating knowledge. The Italian House Company and Pennsylvania State College are technical companions on the mission.

A shrimp like no different

The important thing to MANTIS’s success will come right down to excessive ultraviolet radiation, mentioned David Wilson, who leads the mission’s science staff.

Stars, he defined, can shoot off this radiation in highly effective however usually short-lived explosions. Some planets might not fare effectively below these situations.

“When these emissions hit the highest of a planet’s ambiance, it’s going to increase and a few of it might escape into space,” Wilson mentioned. “You probably have a excessive EUV flux, that planet’s ambiance could also be shortly eroded away.”

Measuring that radiation, nonetheless, will get extraordinarily troublesome. The final satellite to view this sort of mild was NASA’s Excessive Ultraviolet Explorer spacecraft, which operated from 1992 to 2001.

MANTIS, nonetheless, seeks to buck that pattern utilizing two high-tech telescopes packed into its small body. The primary will observe lower-energy ultraviolet radiation. The second will use a design that is by no means earlier than flown into space to gather excessive ultraviolet mild.

“For lots of stars, that is going to be the primary time we have seen what they appear like in excessive ultraviolet,” Wilson mentioned.

The spacecraft builds on know-how from two different CubeSats designed by the identical staff at LASP: The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE), which launched in 2021 and continues to be gathering knowledge at present, and the Supernova Remnants and Proxies for ReIonization Testbed Experiment (SPRITE), which is anticipated to launch subsequent 12 months.

Indahl is worked up to get began constructing the little satellite. She mentioned that when MANTIS launches, it’s going to zoom in on the identical star systems because the Webb telesope. Whereas the bigger spacecraft observes the planets in these methods, MANTIS will check out their stars. Scientists might then be capable to join how vitality from these stars influences the atmospheres of orbiting planets—a coup for researchers searching for worlds like our personal however far-off.

“We’ll be observing stars of all differing kinds, together with a spread of lots and ages,” Indahl mentioned. “We wish to perceive how this flux of UV mild coming from stars impacts the atmospheres of planets and even their habitability.”