OrbitingRainbows

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  • How will NASA find new galaxies? Glitter

    by 
    Daniel Cooper
    Daniel Cooper
    04.17.2015

    Space telescopes are great, but they're hardly the cheapest things to build, launch and maintain, which means scientists are forced to make compromises. The solution to this problem isn't to build a better rocket with a bigger carrying capacity, but to rely upon a low tech way to make any party fabulous: glitter. Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory believe that the high-tech equivalent of shreds of foil could be used as a cheap and lightweight alternative to the hefty mirrors you'd find in the Hubble Telescope.