NASA's new Landolt mission, due to launch in 2029, will orbit an artificial star to enhance measurements of stars and planets. This will improve the accuracy of star brightness calculations by more than ten times, help us understand the planets orbiting these stars, and provide insights into dark energy.

George Mason University will be home to the recently approved $19.5 million Landolt NASA space mission, which will place an artificial "star" into orbit around the Earth. The artificial star will allow scientists to calibrate telescopes and more precisely measure the brightness of stars, from those nearby to those that explode as supernovae in distant galaxies. By establishing an absolute flux calibration, the mission will begin to address several open challenges in astrophysics, including the rate and acceleration of the universe's expansion. Source: George Mason University

NASA has approved a new satellite mission called Landolt designed to place an artificial star in orbit around Earth. The artificial star will emit light with a precisely known brightness, helping scientists more accurately measure the brightness of real stars. These improved measurements will enhance our understanding of stars, including distant supernovae, and the planets that orbit them. The $19.5 million mission could also reveal dark energy, the mysterious force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

"Even with today's modern instruments, measurements of a star's true brightness are only to a few percent," explains David Ciardi, associate director of NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) at IPAC, an astronomy center at Caltech. "Landolt will improve these measurements by more than 10 times. Understanding a star's true brightness will give us a better understanding of the star and, perhaps more importantly, the planets orbiting the star."

The mission is scheduled to launch in 2029 and is led by former IPAC scientist and Caltech alumnus Peter Plavchan (BS '01), now an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University in Virginia.

IPAC will be responsible for archiving mission data and contributing to ground support through Caltech's Palomar Observatory. Other partners include the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a world leader in measuring photon emissions, and several other universities. Other members of the Caltech team include Jessie Christiansen, NExScI's principal scientist and NExScI's NASA Exoplanet Archive project scientist, who helped come up with the mission.

The mission is named after the late astronomer Arlo Landolt, who compiled the widely used catalog of stellar brightnesses in 1973, 1982 and 1992 and who died in 2022. The team will observe this light source or artificial star next to a real star to compile a new catalog of stellar brightness. The artificial star will orbit 22,236 miles above Earth, far enough away to appear like a star to ground-based telescopes. This orbit also allows the satellite to move at the same speed as the Earth's rotation, keeping it above the United States during its primary mission of one year.

Compiled from /ScitechDaily