Impact of Astronomy in Technology

Impact of Astronomy in Technology

Hi my name is Manisha Shrestha. I am a second year graduate student at University of Denver. My research involves understanding the polarization characteristic of stellar bow shock. I hope to be talking more about this in later posts.
A lot of times when we talk about the research in Astronomy, there are people who want to know the importance of this research. How is it going to advance our technologies? When we think about it, the same questions are not asked to a painter for example. A painter creates a painting, and we don't look at it ask about it's importance. We just appreciate its beauty. But when it comes to the branch of science, we want to see how its study is going to affect our day to day lives.
So I thought for the first few blogs I will talk about some of the inventions done by research in astronomy. I will start with the technology called aperture synthesis which is used in computerized tomography (CT). This technology is widely used in medical field.

A CT scanner www.manalihospital.com

Aperture synthesis is a process in which they take signals from various telescopes at same angular resolutions and produce an image. This technology was developed by Nobel Laureate Martin Ryle. Similar technology is used in CT, where series of two dimensional images are used to produce three dimensional image. This makes the study of internal organ easier in medicine. 
Also the programming language developed by astronomy such as IDL, IRAF is widely used in processing images in medicine.
Benefits of astronomy research is far more in technologies than we think of. Astronomy helps to improve the technologies directly as well as indirectly. I will be talking about other advances in technologies due to astronomy in my other posts.