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Post by fretslider on May 22, 2009 22:05:49 GMT
The James Webb Space telescope is still some years away from completion and Hubble has been given a new lease of life. That's the visible part of the spectrum covered, but to see farther back than the Hubble Deep Field you need to start looking in the infra-red, and soon we'll be able to.Last week the European Space Agency launched Herschel-Planck. Herschel carries the largest, most powerful infrared telescope in space. Its mission to study the origin and evolution of stars and galaxies. Herschel has three advanced science instruments: two cameras and a very high resolution spectrometer; their detectors are cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero by a sophisticated cryogenic system. ESA's Planck mission will be the first European space observatory whose main goal is the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background – the relic radiation from the Big Bang. It will measure tiny fluctuations with unprecedented accuracy, providing the sharpest picture ever of the young Universe — when it was only 380 000 years old — and zeroing-in on theories that describe its birth and evolution. Planck too is cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero. Incidentally, L2 is the second Lagrange point (the 5 Lagrange Points mark positions in the vicinity of two orbiting masses where a third, smaller mass can orbit at a fixed distance from the larger masses). What interesting times we live in. European Space Agency
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Post by Liberator on May 22, 2009 22:29:17 GMT
Something has always worried me about Lagrange Points. As you point out, as well as hovering at them orbitting the major bodies, an object can also orbit about them as if they were objects. That must surely create secondary Langrange Points related to the object and its primary. Surely an object could orbit these secondaries, thus creating tertiaries which an object could orbit thus - come back Ptolemaeus, all is forgiven!
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