IXO
LSST
LISA
XENON
s are mounting a
era on an existing
n an attempt to
of dark energy. the
large swath of the
e years to gather
n about more than 300 million
an effort that includes scien-
23 institutions, the survey is
o see first light in fall.
and silicon detectors. though claims of
detection have been made, dark matter’s
identity remains unknown.
JWST the James webb space
telescope will have a primary mirror
6. 5 meters across and will orbit about
1. 5 million kilometers from earth.
the observatory will probe how stars
and galaxies first emerged and will
look for earthlike planets. Launch had
been scheduled for 2014, but has
been pushed back to no earlier than
2016 because of cost overruns (SN:
4/25/11, p. 22).
tter experiments the
rk matter project, operating
nd at gran sasso national
in italy, looks for signs of
ark matter particles by recording scintil-
ations in liquid xenon (detector shown
bove). the dama/LiBra experiment,
t the same lab, records seasonal varia-
ons in faint flashes of light from 25
odium iodide detectors. and an experi-
ment in a mine in northern minnesota,
he cryogenic dark matter search, tries
to spot dark matter jostling germanium
IXO proposed by nasa, the european
space agency and the Japan aerospace
exploration agency, the international
X-ray observatory would take in radia-
tion emitted from neutron stars and
from the vicinity of black holes. search-
ing in the X-ray regime would allow
the observatory to peer through dust
and gas clouds that might otherwise
obscure its view. iXo may reveal how
matter behaves in extreme conditions
and help reveal the nature of dark mat-
ter and dark energy.
LISA the Laser interferometer space
antenna, a proposed nasa-esa mission,
would actually be three identical spacecraft that form a triangle. By recording
how the craft move in relation to each
other, scientists hope Lisa will detect
gravitational waves. Background undulations left over from the early universe
could offer clues to its origin and expansion history.
Euclid named for the father of geometry, the proposed euclid spacecraft (two
concepts shown) would measure dark
matter distribution and try to understand the nature of dark energy by looking back 10 billion years, before dark
energy began to dominate over matter
in the universe.
Fermi image: nasa; LHc: ©cern geneva; pLancK: c. carreau/esa; Lsst: todd mason/mason productions inc., Lsst corporation; eucLid:
esa; iXo: nasa; Lisa: esa; Xenon: Francesco arneodo/inFn, Xenon coLLaBoration; taBLet: viKtor gmyria/ sHutterstocK.com
www.sciencenews.org
april 23, 2011 | science news | 33
