An observatory telescope in Arizona used to discover the distant Pluto nearly 90 years ago will reopen for business on Saturday after a year of extensive restoration work.
Nearly every part of Lowell Observatory’s Pluto Discovery Telescope and accompanying dome near Flagstaff has been refurbished, from the trio of lenses to historic wooden shutters that open up to the stars, the Arizona Daily Sun reported.
The telescope was built in 1928-1929 to search for the mysterious ‘Planet X’, then thought to be a ninth planet lurking unseen in the solar system.
And, in February 1930, an observatory assistant spotted the object that came to be known as Pluto.
A telescope in Arizona used to discover the distant Pluto nearly 90 years ago will reopen for business after a year of extensive restoration work. Peter Rosenthal, left, and Ralph Nye, right, talk about the features of the Pluto Discovery Telescope that the pair helped restore
‘It’s a beautiful telescope,’ said Ralph Nye, part of the restoration team. ‘This is the way it should look.’
The team removed, cleaned and reused everything down to the nuts, bolts and screws – almost nothing needed to be replaced, said Peter Rosenthal, who also worked on the telescope.
The observatory said the nearly 90-year-old telescope is working as well and is looking even better than it did when Clyde Tombaugh used the instrument to pick out distant Pluto 88 years ago.
Known as an astrographic camera, the telescope’s three lenses focus light onto a single glass photographic plate.
Each image requires an exposure time of almost an hour, which would have been a chilly experience for Tombaugh on winter nights because the dome’s shutters have to be open to the sky, Rosenthal said.
As a young observatory assistant, Tombaugh took the exposures and then scrutinized the glass negatives using a Zeiss blink comparator.
On Feb. 18, 1930, he pinpointed Pluto.
The photo shows a setting circle on the Pluto Discovery Telescope, which had its numbers worn off, was restored with fresh paint and new vinyl numbers at the Lowell Observatory
WHAT’S NEXT FOR NASA’S NEW HORIZONS SPACECRAFT?
The spacecraft that gave us the first close-up views of Pluto now has a much smaller object in its sights.
New Horizons is now track to fly past a recently discovered, less than 30-mile-wide object out on the solar system frontier.
The close encounter with what’s known as 2014 MU69 would occur in 2019. It orbits nearly 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto.
Nasa and the New Horizons team chose 2014 MU69 in August as New Horizons’ next potential target, thus the nickname PT-1. Like Pluto, MU69 orbits the sun in the frozen, twilight zone known as the Kuiper Belt.
This illustration provided by NASA shows the New Horizons spacecraft. The probe whipped past Pluto in 2015 and is headed to 2014 MU69 for an attempted 2019 flyby of the tiny, icy world on the edge of the solar system
MU69 is thought to be 10 times larger and 1,000 times more massive than average comets, including the one being orbited right now by Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft.
On the other end, MU69 is barely 1 percent the size of Pluto and perhaps one-ten-thousandth the mass of the dwarf planet. So the new target is a good middle ground, according to scientists.
The spacecraft was recently approved for its extended mission, allowing it to continue on its path toward the object deeper in the Kuiper Belt.
It’s expected that New Horizons will make its approach to the ancient object on January 1, 2019.
Nye said the repairs came in on time and met the project’s $155,000 budget with a few bucks to spare.
Each of the telescope’s three lenses are 13 inches (32.5cm) wide.
To detect an object in space, the researchers focused the light reflected off of it onto a 14- by 17-inch (35 cm x 42.5 cm) glass photographic plate, according to the Observatory, with time exposures of about an hour per image.
The negatives were then analyzed with the Zeiss blink comparator.
The telescope remained in use long after the historic discovery, and was used to study the motion of celestial objects.
Now, nearly a century after it was first constructed, the refurbished instrument is looking as good as new.