A.S.I. - Agenzia Spaziale Italiana - The road to Space goes through Italy.

03 Dec 2009

Italy and Russia will jointly assemble the Millimetron super telescope. The announcement was made during the Italo-Russo summit at Villa Madama. In the presence of the heads of government of both countries, Enrico Saggese, the president of the Italian Space Agency, and Anatoly Nikolayevich Perminov, the head of the Russian agency ROSCOSMOS, signed an agreement regarding bilateral cooperation on the cosmological observation mission. As part of this agreement Italy will contribute the polarimetric spectrometer, one of Millimetron’s principal instruments.

Millimetron is a Russian space mission that plans to construct an orbiting observatory equipped with a mirror 12 metres in diameter, an absolute record in the history of space missions. The telescope will operate in a wide band of the electromagnetic spectrum, in the submillimetre, millimetre and far infrared (a wavelength between 20 µm and 20 mm) wavelength regions and will enable astronomers to observe the Universe with unprecedented sensitivity, angular resolution and spectro-polarimetric capacity. These electromagnetic bands are one of the most promising windows for observing the Universe, being full of scientific information and relatively unexplored. Millimetron will be able to throw light on the cold Universe, the cosmological structures on a wide scale, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and the evolution of galaxy clusters, galaxies, stars and planets. The images at extremely high angular resolution obtainable in VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) mode, a technique that connects independent antennae as if they were part of one single, gigantic instrument) will allow us to study, with unprecedented clarity, compact and ultra-compact astronomical objects. The date for launching Millimetron is scheduled for 2018-2019.
 

The technical capacity of Millimetron, which, for the first time, will allow us to study the Universe and its structures in 3D by spatially resolved spectro-polarimetric analyses, requires an innovative and high performance instrument.  As part of the collaboration agreement, Italy – under the coordination and supervision of the ASI – will supply expertise, feasibility studies, project design and construction of one of Millimetron’s most important and pioneering instruments:  the FTS (SP-FTS) spectro-polarimeter. The instrument is an innovative evolution of the FTS spectrometer which has already successfully been designed for the Phase-A studio of the minor ASI mission, SAGACE.
The project and the feasibility study for the SP-FTS instrument have already received the full support of the scientific community concerned (the universities involved and INAF) and the PMI in the design and scientific use of the instrument. The SP-FTS instrument project, central for Millimetron, makes the Italian scientific community and the ASI principal technical and scientific partners in the Millimetron consortium, and in general will contribute to strengthening the multi-project collaboration between the ASI and ROSCOSMOS.
 

Millimetron is part of a long line of scientific and technical developments already initiated by the ASI alongside its support of the PLANCK and HERSCHEL missions and the two minor projects OLIMPO (a long duration stratospheric balloon flight) and SAGACE (a minor spectral-imaging surveying mission).
An international consortium is being formed to accomplish the Millimetron mission. At the moment, the Millimetron consortium is formed by the Millimetron International Scientific Committee (MISC) and the Millimetron Management Committee (MMC).