As US astronomers cheer the completion of the state-of-the-art project to rejuvenate the iconic Hale Telescope, one key collaborator is locked out of the celebrations and banned from exporting to the United States.
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The Next Generation Palomar Spectrograph (NGPS) has given the 76-year-old telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory an unmatched ability to capture fainter objects and reveal unprecedented details of the universe.
Mansi Kasliwal at Caltech, the project’s principal investigator, said the NGPS – which splits light, much like a prism, to uncover the age, distance, chemical make-up and other properties of celestial bodies – “blows the old one out of the water”.
“It’s the most efficient of any comparable instrument working at other telescopes,” she said.
The NGPS was jointly developed in a unique partnership of American and Chinese institutions that included Caltech and an institute which designs and manufactures spectrographs, reflecting mirrors and other optical components in eastern China.
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The Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology (NIAOT) shipped the finished spectrograph to the United States in 2023 and not long afterwards was added to the US government’s export blacklist.