Pure Science Research Telescopes into Billion Dollar Products

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources Incorporated; Houston, Texas). The convergence of high technologies and pure science applied in space projects has produced a wide range of new materials, precision manufacturing techniques, and communications advances and has become the medium for unlocking empirical chemical and biological problems in sterile, gravity free conditions.

The building of space probing and space journeying telescopes has created its own rewarding contract supply chain and is producing palpable industrial and commercial spin-off benefits. TRW has just won the $825 million contract to build the Hubble Space telescope replacement to be launched in 2010, the $30 million Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) international project is halfway to its completion date of 2004 and in the Khomas Highlands of Namibia researchers from Germany, France, Armenia, United Kingdom, and South Africa are working the $7.5 million High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS).

It is the launch of this new gamma-ray telescope which best illustrates the value of deepest blue sky research.

The first of an array of four telescopes, the Khomas telescope will be used to study high energy rays from cosmic sources such as supernova remnants of collapsed stars and black holes. Just the thing for pure propeller heads and rocket scientists your less percipient colleagues might think.

Tell them to hold the phone...the low noise amplifier, that has been developed by the space physics unit at South Africa's Potchefstroom University, and which will be used in the telescope to detect faint signals, is set to spawn a new generation of technical enhancements in lap tops, the cellphone industry, and a number of downstream hi-tech product ranges. This research product is targeted at a global market of anything up to $50 billion.

The HESS telescopes will measure Cherenkov radiation, which lasts for a few nanoseconds and consists of a few photons of light. This radiation occurs when gamma rays pass through the earth's atmosphere. The amplifier will enable the telescope's camera to take pictures at 500 million frames a second, increasing current speeds by a factor of eight, which will allow more sensitive detection of the faintest light of Cherenkov radiation.

The project's technology broker, Armscor Technology Center (TEC)(Pretoria, South Africa), sees major commercial applications in radar and cellphone tower technology to be derived from the amplifier. The range of cellphone towers could be increased by 50% providing a significant savings on investment in infrastructural set up.

The project the team added more future product value when they met calibration problems by inventing a more energy efficient metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (mosfet). Mosfets are used in integrated circuits in power supplies for laptops, cellphones, and a whole array of hand held devices. The improved mosfet, which the team calls a visfet, is more energy efficient, generates less heat and enables the construction of lighter and longer lasting power supplies. A cellphone battery fitted with a visfet will last three to four times longer than one with a standard mosfet, claims the broker. The visfet has been patented in South Africa, China, India, Australia, the USA and Europe. International manufacturers will be licensed to manufacture the devices.

Mark Shuttleworth, South African internet billionaire and space traveler, is putting venture capital into Sterizone (Germiston, South Africa), a local company which will use visfet devices to improve the efficiency of its ozone generators which are used in sterilization processes where chlorine is unacceptable. The visfets will curb energy losses in the electron stripping process.

The James Webb telescope will travel for three months to arrive at a point in space 1.504 million kilometers from earth after its rocket launch in 2010. It will be in an orbit balanced between the gravity of the sun and the earth. The Hubble telescope, which it is replacing, is in an earth orbit that has allowed it to be serviced by astronauts subsequent to its launch from a space shuttle in 1990. NASA has awarded the contract for the telescope to TRW (NYSE:TRW) (Cleveland, Ohio). The 'next generation' telescope is being designed to peer deep into the universe in the infrared wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Its primary mirror will be at least 20 ft across compared to Hubble's 8 ft.

The SALT telescope project has five U.S. institutional and scientific partners, six from the United Kingdom, and others from Germany, Ireland and Poland in addition to South African participation.

Situated under the clearest and darkest night skies of the Northern Cape province, SALT will be the largest single optical astronomical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. It will allow astronomers to explore the origins of the universe, study quasars, active galactic nuclei, and galaxy populations. It will also search for planets orbiting other stars. Contracts are spread internationally with much of the construction and scientific finishing work being executed in South Africa.

The SALT telescope is based, with local refinements, on the University of Texas at Austin's Hobby-Eberly telescope at Fort Davis. A working collaboration has been formed between the Sutherland and Fort Davis scientists and engineers in the officially 'twinned' towns.

No doubt the results of the dedication of the HESS team in producing commercial benefits from the pursuit of pure science will be replicated by the James Webb and SALT project teams.