The world's first commercial deep space astronomy telescope is set to search for stars that could host habitable exoplanets in their orbits.The Mauve telescope, developed by London-headquartered start-up Blue Skies Space, is the size of a small suitcase and carries an off-the-shelf ultraviolet spectrometer modified to monitor flaring stars. It is one of the payloads that will launch on SpaceX's upcoming Transporter-15 mission, currently set for no earlier than November 2025.
Since scientific interest in exoplanets is on the rise, Blue Skies Space decided to cover the increasing demand for observations of stellar flares with a small, low-cost telescope and sell the resulting data to scientists worldwide through a yearly subscription model."The space agencies do a fantastic job at delivering very high-quality space telescopes, but sometimes it can take a long time," Tessenyi said. "And when these satellites are operational, like the Hubble Space Telescope or James Webb, people have to apply and hope they get the observing time they need. But not all science requires a very large and complicated satellite."
“It’s a new way of doing astronomy,” says Emma Whelan, an astronomer at Maynooth University and one of Mauve’s first subscribers. Mauve aims to supply optical-ultraviolet observations of tempestuous young stars that larger instruments, such as the oversubscribed Hubble Space Telescope, only offer to the select few. But whether enough researchers will sign up to make Mauve sustainable remains to be seen.With launch costs falling and telescope components getting cheaper, private missions backed by companies or philanthropies are “definitely something that will be more common in the future, and we’ll see how ambitious they can really be,” says Jon Morse, former head of astrophysics at NASA and now president of AstronetX who attempted a decade ago to launch a philanthropy-funded telescope to look for exoplanets around nearby stars.
The development of the satellite, which will ride into space as soon as 10 November on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, was funded by a €1.2 million grant from the European Union, combined with prelaunch subscriptions, grants, and investors. An annual subscription, which provides researchers with access to all of Mauve’s data, costs the rough equivalent of a year’s salary for a Ph.D. student. Nine research groups have signed up already, Tessenyi says, and they hope more will join once Mauve is in orbit and functioning. If the model works and makes a profit, Blue Skies will put that toward its next project, a 0.5-meter telescope to study exoplanets called Twinkle. “I think there’s a little bit of a wait and see” going on, says Vanderbilt University astronomer Keivan Stassun, another early subscriber who plans to study how eruptions of hot plasma from young stars affect the atmospheres of nearby planets.
I am waiting for Twinkle mission a long time...
TwinkleExpected to launch in late 2027 and operate from a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) at an altitude of 1200 km with an orbital period of ∼105 minutes, the Twinkle Space Telescope is a commercial venture by Blue Skies Space Ltd. Set to study both solar-system and extra-solar objects, the mission is expected to characterize the atmospheres of 10s to 100s of exoplanets during its nominal three-year exoplanet survey, providing the first large-scale, homogeneous, exoplanet spectroscopic survey. The spacecraft consists of a 0.45-m diameter primary mirror with an actively cooled inner sanctum, in which a spectrometer with two channels is housed. CH0 0.5-2.4 µm and CH1 2.4-4.5 µm, that will reach peak spectral resolving powers of R = 70 and R = 50, respectively [9, 42]. These channels will operate simultaneously, providing continuous coverage between 0.5–4.5 µm and expanding on the wavelength coverage of HST/WFC3 by just over a factor of 4.The mission’s Sun-synchronous polar orbital configuration allows for the observation of targets between ±40◦ of the ecliptic, whilst the use of reliable, established heritage components enables reduced costs relative to traditional mission pathways.
