In half a decade, George Mason University students and faculty will help NASA launch an “artificial star” into space.
The university’s Fairfax campus will serve as mission control for the Landolt NASA Space Mission, which will send a laser-pointing satellite into Earth’s orbit in 2029, GMU announced on June 10. The artificial star created by the satellite will help scientists more accurately calculate the brightness of real stars.
GMU says the mission will be a “first-of-its-kind project” for a university in the D.C. area, involving not only NASA, but also the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Colorado-based satellite company Blue Canyon Technologies, and eight other universities.
“This mission marks another first for George Mason University, a milestone that proves our impact as a major public research university truly knows no bounds,” GMU President Gregory Washington said in a press release. “It’s an honor for George Mason to lead this unique team seeking to expand the boundaries of knowledge through College of Science associate professor Peter Plavchan’s collaboration with NASA, one of George Mason’s most prestigious research partners.”
Students and faculty with Mason’s College of Science and College of Engineering and Computing will collaborate with the other participating organizations to design, build, launch and study the “artificial star,” which will be about the size of a bread box and orbit Earth from 22,236 miles above ground.
According to GMU, the satellite’s orbit needs to be far enough away that it’ll resemble a star when viewed through telescopes on Earth, and it’ll move at the same speed as the planet’s rotation, keeping it over the U.S. throughout its first year.
The satellite will shine eight photon lasers back to Earth, allowing scientists to calibrate their telescopes on the ground and measure the brightness of stars both near and far. The lights won’t be visible to the naked eye, but they will be strong enough to see with a personal telescope.
As mission control, GMU researchers will be able to send commands to the satellite, and the Fairfax observatory will serve as one of four main telescope sites, according to Plavchan, Mason’s director of observatories.
The other three sites will be in Hawaii, California and Chile, though others will be able to participate through a guest observer program.
The other universities involved in the Landolt mission are the California Institute of Technology, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Mississippi State University, the University of Montreal’s Montreal Planetarium and iREx, the University of Florida, the University of Hawaiʻi, the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and the University of Victoria.
The actual launch date and location, however, remain to be determined.
“We are reviewing possible options,” Plavchan told FFXnow. “It won’t launch from Fairfax. The closest possible launch site would be NASA Wallops.”
According to the release, measurements calculated using the artificial star could lead to breakthroughs in astrophysics, particularly when it comes to scientists’ understanding of “dark energy” — a theoretical force believed to be causing the universe to expand.
The mission builds on the work of its namesake astronomer Arlo Landolt, who died in 2022 and was best known for assembling catalogs used to measure the brightness and colors of stars, a field of study known as stellar photometry.
While the Landolt mission may sound esoteric, the astronomers involved hope it will help them find answers to questions that have fascinanted humankind for ages, including how the universe functions and whether there might be life on other planets.
“This mission is focused on measuring fundamental properties that are used daily in astronomical observations,” Eliad Peretz, NASA Goddard mission and instrument scientist and Landolt’s deputy principal investigator, said. “It might impact and change the way we measure or understand the properties of stars, surface temperatures, and the habitability of exoplanets.”
