China to launch world’s first ‘lobster eye’ space telescope

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is ready to launch its spacecraft Einstein Probe in January 2024.

The Einstein probe is inspired by the lobster’s eye. The lobster’s eye is special because it lets light come in from all directions. This light then reflects in the tubes and focuses on the retina, giving the lobster a wide field of view and helping it see a lot around itself in the ocean.

Equipped with a new generation of X-rays, the Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT) and the Follow-up X-ray Telescope (FXT), the Einstein Probe will survey the sky and hunt for powerful blasts of X-ray light coming from mysterious celestial objects such as neutron stars and black holes.

The WXT is designed like a lobster’s eyes and uses Micro Pore Optics. This lets it look at a really big part of the sky, almost one-tenth of the whole sky at once – 3,600 square degrees.

With this, the Einstein Probe can keep an eye on almost all of the night sky in just three orbits around Earth, and each orbit takes about 96 minutes.

Einstein Probe is a collaboration led by CAS with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), Germany.

They’re pooling their knowledge and resources to explore the secrets of the universe using the Einstein Probe.

“Thanks to its innovative design, the Einstein Probe can monitor large swaths of the sky at a glance.

“In this way, we can discover many new sources while at the same time study the behaviour of X-ray light coming from known celestial objects over long periods.” Erik Kuulkers, ESA’s Einstein Probe Project Scientist, said.

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Kuulkers added that studying high-energy processes in the cosmos is only possible through missions like the Einstein Probe, which are crucial to advancing our understanding of fundamental physics.

The observation of fresh X-ray sources is of paramount importance in advancing our understanding of the genesis of gravitational waves.

The soon-to-come Einstein Probe will be like a cosmic detective, trying to learn more about what’s happening out there in space.

“Einstein Probe’s capabilities are highly complementary to the in-depth studies of individual cosmic sources enabled by the other missions,” Kuulkers added.

ESA has been crucial in the creation of the Einstein Probe’s scientific tools. They helped test and calibrate the X-ray detectors and the optics of WXT.

ESA also collaborated with MPE and Media Lario (Italy) to develop the mirror assembly for one of FXT’s two telescopes.