| From: [email protected]
Newsgroups: clari.tw.space
Date: 25 Oct 91 16:08:40 GMT
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. (UPI) -- NASA has chosen a Penn State astronomist
to manage the design and production of the $5.25 million ``brain'' of a
new space telescope.
France Cordova, who heads Penn State's Department of Astronomy and
Astrophysics, will be principal U.S. investigator for the project, the
university said Friday.
The project is part of the $1 billion X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission
headed by the European Space Agency, which is scheduled for launch in
1998. During its 10-year mission, XMM will gather information on all
classes of objects now known to exist in the universe.
The ``brain,'' a digital processing unit, will send space pictures to
Earth from the mission's only optical telescope, the Optical Monitor. It
will control the telescope to take optical pictures simultaneously with
the mission's three X-ray telescopes designed to probe a much larger
area of the universe than ever before.
The Optical Monitor is being fabricated by an international
consortium of universities and research laboratories.
Cordova said astronomers will use simultaneous observations in X-ray
and visible wavelengths to understand the physical mechanisms of
radiation emissions from stars and other objects in space.
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