L2: It ain't half busy

Yesterday I discovered the website for Big Occulting Steerable Satellite (BOSS) - who comes up with these. It seems that it is a planned 70 m2 sheet of polyimide that will be able to occult stars etc. on demand. However, I noticed that it will be placed at L2 (the second Lagrangian point which is on the other side of the Earth to the Sun) and if this goes ahead it will be getting busy at L2 in a few years time. WMAP is already there but Planck will be going there around 2008, the James Webb Space Telescope in 2011, GAIA in 2009 and Darwin (an ESA mission to look for Earth like planets) in 2014. Hopefully they won't all get in the way of each other.

Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Wednesday 26th Nov 2003 (14:39 UTC) | Add a comment | Permalink

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