Prisoners of Tomorrow
“Designed for studying the universe at high resolution in the longer-than-optical wavelengths that the Earth’s atmosphere blocks almost completely, it boasted a main telescope built around a 200-centimeter-diameter primary mirror, which was cooled with liquid helium to avoid polluting its sensitive detectors with heat radiated from the structure. Since becoming fully operational five years previously, the observatory had penetrated the screening dust clouds that attend both the births and deaths... of stars, bringing a new understanding of stellar evolution; it had mapped the inner regions of the Milky Way and pinpointed the supermassive black hole centered there; and it helped reveal the dynamics of energetic distant galaxies. Its instruments were sensitive enough to detect a speck of dust thirty miles away by its heat radiation alone; also, it was in an almost-polar orbit oriented such that for the next several days it would be able to train those instruments on Valentina Tereshkova continuously.MoreLess
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