Meet WFIRST - the telescope with power of 100 Hubbles

Despite being the same mirror size of 2.4m as the reliable Hubble telescope, the WFIRST (Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope) have a gigantic 300 megapixles camera that enables it to capture the image of an area that is hundred times greater than that of Hubble. 

This amazing camera is coupled with one of the most sensitive coronagraphs ever made, which allows it to block out distant lights on a star-by-star basis. This would help the WFIRST telescope to uncover some of the biggest mysteries of cosmos. WFIRST will also try to find out millions of earth like exoplanets. 

In a recent paper describing the project, the scientists at NASA working on this ambitious mission told that the telescope is set to launch in mid-2020's. 

However, what is quite amusing regarding this project is that it was never supposed to happen. Throughout decades, several teams of astronomers had brought proposals for a new space-based telescope dedicated to the mission of solving the mysteries of dark energy. However, none of these proposals went anywhere and nobody was going to get their space telescope projects become reality. 

But in 2012, those working at National Reconnaissance Office (who were responsible for designing and building secret satellites), found that they had a couple of huge telescopes just sitting around somewhere in a back-site warehouse. 

So, they took the initiative and classified them so that they could give them to NASA to do something useful with them. 

The actual mirror and housing isn't the most expensive part, so it wasn't a huge relief to any existing proposals, but somehow it gave the concept to just get it turned into a mission. 

The name WFIRST itself has a history and there is a reason why the letter 'w' comes first. The primary goal of this project is to unveil one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of all time - dark energy, the mysterious force behind the expansion of the universe. 

We currently don't understand the nature of dark energy and its properties. So far, astronomers have just created some simple models to atleast give it a mathematical skin that can help in further understanding it. 

In this model, dark energy is considered as a fluid that soaks all of spacetime. And hence, just like any other fluid, it also has some density and pressure. One can define an equation of state that relates the fluid density and pressure with each other. 

It turns out that in case of universe, the ratio of pressure to the density is a very useful number giving an idea of how bad the accelerated expansion is going to be. And the symbol used to represent this ratio is the letter 'w'. Hence, this letter comes first in the name of this mission. 

One other aim of this project is to explore millions of distant exoplanets. WFIRST is equipped with one of the world's best cameras attached to it. This camera will be taking a lot of high-resolution pictures of deep space for a long time and hence will try to find out earth like exoplanets. 

However, it won't be using conventional methods to find planets,. Instead, it will use a technique known as 'gravitational microlensing'. In this technique, the light coming from a distant star that is being observed, bends around an interloping planet. This causes a brief but telltale flare in the brightness of that star. 

Furthermore, the addition of a coronagraph allows WFIRST to block out light from that distant star enabling its giant camera to directly take pictures of the exoplanets. 

WFIRST is one of the most promising missions of all time as it carries two major science goals with it. It will uncover the deep space in near future and unravel some of the biggest unsolved mysteries that humankind has been trying to answer for centuries. 

Images and video credit: NASA/ Goddard Space Flight Center/Wiessinger