PASHIPAE Mission will peep into unknown regions of the sky

PASHIPAE Mission will peep into unknown regions of the sky

Subject : Science & tech

Context : Recently, the Scientists from the University of Crete, Greece, Caltech, USA, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), India, the South African Astronomical Observatory and the University of Oslo, Norway, are involved in PASIPHAE Mission.

Concept:

PASIPHAE Mission

• Polar-Areas Stellar-Imaging in Polarisation High-Accuracy Experiment (PASIPHAE) is an international collaborative sky surveying project.
• The project has been funded by the world’s leading institutions from USA, Norway, South Africa and Private foundations.
• Scientists aim to study the polarisation in the light coming from millions of stars.
• The survey will use two high-tech optical polarimeters to observe the northern and southern skies, simultaneously.
• It will focus on capturing starlight polarisation of very faint stars that are so far away that polarisation signals from there have not been systematically studied.
• The distances to these stars will be obtained from measurements of the GAIA satellite (of European Space Agency)
• By combining these data, astronomers can create a 3-Dimensional model of the distribution of the dust and magnetic field structure of the galaxy using a novel polarimeter instrument known as WALOP (Wide Area Linear Optical Polarimeter).

What is WALOP?

• Wide Area Linear Optical Polarimeter (WALOP) is an instrument, when mounted on two small optical telescopes, that will be used to detect polarised light signals emerging from the stars along high galactic latitudes.
• A WALOP each will be mounted on the 1.3-metre Skinakas Observatory, Crete (Greek islands), and on the 1-metre telescope of the South African Astronomical Observatory located in Sutherland.
• Once built, they will be unique instruments offering the widest ever field of view of the sky in polarimetry. In simple terms, the images will simultaneously have the finest of details of a star along with its panoramic background.
• 200 kg weighing WALOP will be capable of observing hundreds of stars concurrently present both in the northern and the southern skies.