NASA Will Stare Into the Cosmic Abyss for Signs of Star Babies

Humans are easily captivated by bright, shiny objects, so it's no wonder that most of us focus on stars, planets, and other radiant objects when gazing at the night sky. But what about the interstellar medium, the giant shadowy expanse between these bright beacons? What kind of weird stuff is it up to under the cover of cosmic darkness?

NASA intends to shed light on this dark frontier with the upcoming Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph (CHESS) mission, scheduled to launch on Tuesday around 1 AM from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. It will blast off at this late hour to prevent the Sun's light from interfering with the view of the distant star system.

The payload will be delivered to space onboard a Black Brant IX sounding rocket. Sounding rockets are much smaller, cheaper launch vehicles that send payloads on suborbital, rather than orbital, trajectories.

Over the course of its short flight, which is projected to last about 16 minutes, the mission's light-filtering spectrograph will focus its attention on Beta Scorpii, a highly luminous star system located about 500 light years away.

CHESS is designed to collect light emitted by the system as it travels toward Earth through the interstellar medium, which is liberally sprinkled with gas and dust, left over from dying stars.

As light rays pass through these eerie stellar cemeteries, they will become distorted by the atomic and molecular detritus of exploded star guts, an effect that the spectrograph can pick up. The best data will be collected at altitudes between 90 and 200 miles, during the apex of the flight, where CHESS will have a clear shot of the backlit cosmic abyss without atmospheric interference. From that vantagepoint, details about the composition, dynamics, and ambient temperature of the medium can be captured by the instrument.

Though the interstellar wilds may seem dull and desolate to the naked eye, these clouds are active zones that may one day condense into stellar nurseries. CHESS, and concept missions like the GUSTO balloon observatory or the LUVOIR space telescope, aim to understand how this process begins in the inconspicuous medium between stars.

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