New Sacramento Times
Marco Peterson Space Telescope Launches!
Date: April 15th, 2024
After 13 years of continuous development, CASA has announced that the Marco Peterson Space Telescope (Peterson for short) has successfully launched. Peterson is the most advanced space telescope to have launched thus far and is a staple of Pacifican engineering and will utilize new technologies invented specifically for it.
Peterson will deploy at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point, which is one of five points in which the gravitational influences of two larger orbiting bodies (The Sun and the Earth in this case) causes a smaller object (Peterson in this case)to maintain its position relative to the larger orbiting bodies. In essence, Peterson will remain locked in place as it orbits the Earth and the Sun (see GIF for reference). This makes it the farthest space telescope ever launched. This distance however, means that it won't arrive at it's intended location for a few days. During its journey to the L2 Lagrangian point, it will slowly extend it's sun-shield and deploy other instruments. CASA officials have stated that launching it was the first moment of terror, the second moment terror is watching it deploy. It's distance from Earth makes it difficult to repair manually. So, if anything goes wrong during it's deployment phase, fixing it would be very difficult if even possible at all.
~ All five Lagrangian points, Peterson will be deployed at L2
The telescope is named after Marco Peterson, the first administrator and founder of CASA. He played a crucial role in lobbying the old Federalist government to not only establish a space agency but to also invest heavily in it. He served as administer of CASA from it's formation in 2005 to 2012. During his time as administrator, he spearheaded many projects that would secure Pacifica's place in outer-space research. Most notably, he oversaw the creation of the Mars rover program, the development of the Kepler Planet Hunter Telescope, and the early development of what would become the Peterson Space Telescope. He would die from natural causes in August of 2012 and the then called New Generation Space Telescope would renamed in his honor.
Peterson is designed to be successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble, originally a NASA project which saw contributions from the European Space Agency, was subsumed by the ESA after NASA was dissolved by the Union State. The ESA spent a few additional years tweaking problems that were overlooked by NASA and launched the space telescope in 1995. However, even with ESA tweaks, Hubble was plagued with technical issues that required manual repair operations. Despite this though, Hubble provided groundbreaking discoveries and research in cosmology, astronomy, and essentially all fields of space science. It's images have altered the public perception of space itself, providing people with a direct look into the mystery's of the cosmos. However, Hubble is aging and it's limited by it's old technology.
Peterson is a technological marvel that improves upon Hubble significantly. It will have a more sensitive and overall greater resolution than Hubble, providing Astronomers and Cosmologists the ability to peer even further into the Universe's past, such as the formation of early galaxies. Peterson will also provide astronomers the means to better understand the formation of stars and planets, and even has the capability of directly imaging exoplanets. However, these images of exoplanets won't be anything spectacular, rather the exoplanets would appear as small dots, some hardly larger than a pixel. A small dot is all planetary scientists need though, to understand the atmosphere, composition, potential vegetation, and other details, of an exoplanet.
Peterson will mainly observe light in a lower frequency range, from long-wavelength visible light through mid-infrared light. In contrast, Hubble only observes visible, near ultra-violet, and near-infrared light. This allows Peterson to observe red-shifted objects that are too far way for even the mighty Hubble to observe. However, to in order to observe infrared light unmolested, Peterson must be extremely cold. This is why it employs a massive sun shield of which will sunlight from hitting the Telescope, which will keep it at a nice and cool −220 °C. It's telescope employs the largest primary mirror of any space telescope. So large in fact, that it must be separated into segments that will unfold during deployment. More technical details of the primary mirror, along side other components and instruments within the telescope, can be found the follow up article written by a CASA engineer.
Overall, the Peterson Space Telescope will likely revolutionize our understanding of the early Universe and the many present components of the Universe of today, such as the formation and composition of exoplanets. CASA has confirmed that they will test Peterson's exoplanet direct imaging capabilities on the closest star-system to our Sun, Democritus (named after the Greek philosopher, Democritus). Democritus is 3.95 light years way and is known to have at least three confirmed exoplanets (Democritus A, B, and C), two of which are located in the stars habitable zone. They will use Peterson to image and observe Democritus's companion Socrates, which was originally thought to have been a low-mass type M star, but was later found out to actually be a brown-dwarf, in-order to better understand the formation and nature of these failed-stars.
CASA has confirmed that they are considering creating a second variant of Peterson, one that will be deployed at a different Lagrangian Point. CASA officials state that one space telescope will only give us one picture of just one side of the Universe, the discovery of Democritus in 2015 had shown that even stars that are so close to us can allude us for so long. Thus, CASA believes that a second similar telescope could allow for even more discoveries within our neighborhood and allow us to observe areas that were previously unobservable due to limitations in past technology and previous space telescope's close proximity to Earth. Depending on the performance of Peterson, Congress could approve for the creation of a second one; however even with the United Republic's large space spending, there is only so many projects we can do at once. Thus the likelihood of a second Peterson telescope any time soon is low, at least until CASA's other projects are completed.