Telescopes will typically have apertures from 60mm or 140mm and more. Telescopes have bigger apertures and lenses to let in more light as they are normally used at night.
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Spotters come with objective lenses in sizes ranging 45mm to 100mm but 60-80mm is common. The size of the lens is the second number after the x in the specifications for spotting scopes but telescopes usually list it within the specifications or blend it into the model name somehow. The bigger the objective lens the more light a scope can take in and the clearer the picture you will see. You can’t beat a telescope for magnification power. All these and more can turn 60x magnification into a blur and make it very difficult to see something. 60x however is as usually as much as you’ll need to see objects in the day as anything more will normally be affected by ambient conditions in the atmosphere like air currents, dust particles, heat waves. Pair that against the humble spotting scope where many spotting scopes top out at 60x magnification. "I felt like I'd lost 20 pounds.120x magnification power means the image is 120 times the size of what you’d see with the naked eye. "A huge weight was lifted," McEnery said. Within an hour of the thruster push, Fermi was back to work. "There was a lot of suspense and tension leading up to it, but once it was over, we just sighed with relief that it all went well." "The maneuver, which was performed by the spacecraft itself based on procedures we developed a long time ago, was very simple, just firing all thrusters for one second," said Eric Stoneking, the altitude control lead engineer for Fermi. It then stowed its solar panels and tucked away its high-gain antenna to protect them from the thruster exhaust, NASA noted. On April 3, NASA instructed the telescope to stop scanning the sky and orient itself along its direction of travel. If the thrusters had a propellant leak or an explosion, they could have taken Fermi out of commission. The problem was that the thrusters had never been tested. NASA reported that the only way to move Fermi a safe distance away from Cosmos 1805's path was to fire Fermi's thrusters, which were designed to be used at the end of the satellite's life to take it out of orbit. She learned of the problem on March 29 when she was going through her email and noticed an automatically generated report from NASA's Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis team based at the Goddard Space Flight Center.Īt that point, Fermi was just one week away from trouble. Upon discovering that the two objects were on a near-collision course, McEnery found that being a project scientist also means being a space traffic controller. "My immediate reaction was, 'Whoa, this is different from anything we've seen before!' " said Julie McEnery, project scientist for NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The Iridium satellite was destroyed when it was battered by clouds of debris around the Russian satellite.Īfter the loss of the Iridium four years ago, NASA was on high alert for this potential collision. In February 2009, for example, NASA scientists thought a dead Russian communications satellite would pass about 1,900 feet from a working Iridium 33 communications satellite. While the objects were expected to miss each other, NASA scientists have learned that they can't take the risk. NASA calculated that with a speed relative to Fermi's of 27,000 mph, a collision with the Russian satellite would release as much energy as two- and-a-half tons of high explosives, destroying both spacecraft, and further littering Earth's orbit with potentially dangerous debris. When you're talking about a costly telescope like Fermi, that's just too close for comfort for NASA.Īs bad as it would have been to lose the Fermi, there was something else to consider. The satellite and the space telescope would occupy the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of each other.
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The two objects, which are both speeding around the Earth at thousands of miles an hour in perpendicular orbits, were expected to come within 700 feet of each other, NASA reported. Yep, a spy satellite, dubbed Cosmos 1805, that dates back to the Cold War.Īt the end of March, NASA realized that the defunct satellite was heading toward the famed Fermi space telescope, which for nearly five years has been mapping the highest-energy light in the universe. This space junk was a 3,100-pound defunct Soviet spy satellite. And, no, this particular piece of space junk isn't a lost bolt or a paint chip. NASA is just now talking about how it saved the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope from destruction by a collision with a piece of space junk last month.