NASA’s new Landolt mission, launching in 2029, will orbit an artificial star around Earth to enhance stellar and planetary measurements.
This will improve the accuracy of stellar brightness calculations by over ten times, aiding in our understanding of planets orbiting these stars and providing insights into dark energy.
The Landolt Mission
NASA has approved a new satellite mission called Landolt, designed to place an artificial star in orbit around Earth. This artificial star will emit light with a precisely known brightness, helping scientists measure the brightness of real stars more accurately. 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 shed light on dark energy, the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.
Advancements in Stellar Measurements
“Even with today’s modern instruments, measurements of the true brightness of stars have only been known to a few percent,” explains David Ciardi, deputy director for the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) at IPAC, an astronomy center based at Caltech. “Landolt will enable an improvement in those measurements by more than a factor of 10. Understanding the true brightness of stars allows us to understand the stars better, and, perhaps more importantly, understand the planets that orbit the stars better.”
Launch and Partnerships
The mission, planned for launch in 2029, is led by a former IPAC scientist and Caltech alum Peter Plavchan (BS ’01), who is now an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University in Virginia.
IPAC will be responsible for archiving the mission’s data and will contribute to the ground support through Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. Additional partners include the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a world leader in measuring photon emissions, in addition to several other universities. Other Caltech team members include Jessie Christiansen, the NExScI chief scientist and the project scientist for the NASA Exoplanet Archive at NExScI, who helped propose the mission.
Tribute to Arlo Landolt and Mission Goals
Named for late astronomer Arlo Landolt, who put together widely used catalogs of stellar brightness in 1973, 1982, and 1992, and who passed away in 2022, this mission will launch a light source into the sky with a known emission rate of photons. The team will observe the light source, or artificial star, next to real stars to make new stellar brightness catalogs. The artificial star will orbit 22,236 miles above Earth, far enough away to look like a star to telescopes on the ground. This orbit also allows the satellite to move at the same speed of the Earth’s rotation, keeping it in place over the United States during its one-year primary mission.
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