GSU professor awarded $5 million grant to develop techniques to see faint objects in outer space

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Dr. Stuart Jefferies and his team have positioned different mirrors, cameras and lenses in a Georgia State University laboratory to mimic Earth’s turbulent atmosphere when looking at small and faint objects up in space.

“Many satellites now are the size of a laptop or smaller, and when they’re hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, they’re not sending much light back to us, so they’re very difficult to see, let alone figure out what they are,” said Jefferies, a professor of physics and astronomy at Georgia State.

Jefferies was recently awarded $5 million by the U.S. Air Force to develop techniques to detect, map and image objects that are extremely difficult to see beyond Earth’s atmosphere – objects like communications satellites.

“We have valuable assets in space and we want to protect them. We want to understand the health of our assets, but we also want to understand what other people’s assets might have in mind for our assets,” he said.

Jefferies says the United States has many assets in outer space, as do many other countries, which makes the area very congested.

To strengthen our national security, he says we must know what all of the objects around us are and the intent of other manmade objects that are not our own.

“Why are they there? What are they looking at? What are they capable of?” said Jefferies.

Jefferies and his team also hope to develop a telescope larger than any that exist with the ability to see objects in much finer detail.

“I think we’re going to get some pretty interesting results out of this, hopefully change the paradigm of how we do astronomy,” said Daniel Johns, a graduate research student working on the project.

Johns is grateful to be working on a project with far-reaching impacts with the potential to unlock parts of the universe we’ve never seen before.

“It’s cool to be able to do something that will impact a whole bunch of people down the road. It’s nice to be able to put your stamp on that at the very beginning,” he said.