Aug 7 2010
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted a $2.4 million funding to Philip R. Goode, a Physics professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).
NJIT Solar Telescope
The funding has been awarded to enhance the optics at the BBSO (Big Bear Solar Observatory) in California, by developing a new kind of adaptive optics. The new adaptive optics will help in eradicating the distortion effects of the Earth’s atmosphere over the sun’s view field.
The BBSO is located above a mountain lake and it has been owned and operated by NJIT since 1997, under Philip Goode’s direction. The new solar telescope at BBSO began operation from last fall. This telescope will be a forerunner for the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope, which is a much larger ground-based telescope to be constructed over the next 10 years.
The new optics, to be developed by Goode and partners at National Solar Observatory, is called as multi-conjugate adaptive optics. This optical system will enable researchers to widen the distortion-free field view to study the sun’s puzzling areas in a better way. The telescope includes a high-order optics system, which feeds the next-generation technologies to measure magnetic fields using infrared and visible light.