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The Humble Space Telescope
frank249 writes " How would you like to do your own astronomy research with a space-based telescope? Sounds unlikely? Perhaps today, since there's only one available, and NASA has it booked pretty solid. However, this is about to change. The Canadian Space Agency just signed a contract to launch Canada's first space telescope, is scheduled to be launched in October 2002. If successful, millions of astronomers worldwide will have access to a more humble version of NASA's Hubble via the internet. It is scheduled to be launched in October 2002 as part of a multiple payload mission from Plesetsk, Russia, on an SS-19 based launch vehicle called Rockot. The SS-19 was supposed to be destroyed as part of an Arms reduction treaty so why not get some use out of it?" And it's so cute, it looks like mod furniture.
From dictionary.com
3.The orientation of an aircraft's axes relative to a reference line or plane, such as the horizon.
4.The orientation of a spacecraft relative to its direction of motion.
If anyone's interested there's a great article in last month's Wired that talks about how Russia is using their rockets to make some ca$h launching other people's satellites. Seems to be working pretty well too!
Have a Happy.
As a former HST employee, I just wanted to let you know that the astronomical data from the Hubble Space Telescope is available online to anyone who wants access! Of course, astronomers have a certain time period before their data becomes available to give them a chance to analyze it first. It used to be a year, I believe. After that, it's available from http://archive.stsci.edu/hst/search_retrieve.html. That page should have all the info needed to start.
Happy stargazing!
One of the team leaders was on a CBC radio science show. He said that while the $3 billion Hubble was designed to be good at many different observation tasks, the MOST will be great in only a few limited tasks. It would be, as noted in the proposal STELLAR SEISMOLOGY FROM SPACE , ironic if an optical telescope only 15 cm across, armed only with a broadband photometer and with a budget of only about Cdn$12M, could probe the cores of stars and set a limit on the age of the Universe thus shedding new light on a fundamental question in cosmology.
He also said that an unprecedented amount of time will be allocated to amateur observer projects through a public outreach programme.
After MOST achieves its primary scientific goals, we plan to give the Canadian public a chance to make observations with this unique space observatory. In conjunction with the RASC (Royal Astronomical Society of Canada), an Amateur Observers' Contest will be held. Amateur astronomers and students will be able to submit observing proposals for MOST, with the technical support of Canadian astronomers.
The MOST Project also plans to spread information about our project and its science through the Pacific Space Centre in Vancouver, B.C.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
IMO comparing this and the HST is misleading. They may be both telescopes, they may both be on satellites and they may both be in orbit (or, eventually be) but they are very different devices.
The diffraction limit of a telescope is proportional to the size of it's aperture - the size of the 'end' where the light goes in. Basically, the more light you can capture the more you can see: generally, very faint things are hard to see. The resolving power of a telescope is believed to be limited by the diffraction limit. (I may of course be wrong, I'm not a qualified astronomer - I've only just began.)
Ground based telescopes are considerably larger and, if there wasn't kilometres of air between it and the near-vacuum of space, would have much greater resolving power than the HST.
At the time the HST was launched, there was a need to 'see' without the atmosphere being in the way. It has been useful. Modern ground based telescopes using things like adaptive optics can see things which the HST can't - don't underestimate the resolving power of a telescope on the ground compared to the HST. The HST is still very useful, even AO doesn't correct 'perfectly', but then the HST optics are not perfect either: those spikes that come off the center of the stars aren't supposed to be there. They're called diffraction spikes and I'm lead to believe they're caused by the telescopes structure.
The MOST will be a useful tool, but it's a tool for a purpose and as a general telescope I'm not confident that it would compare well to the HST or ground based telescopes.
At the rate ground based telescopes are improving, don't expect the additional cost of producing general telescopes like the HST to be met often - but I'd expect more devices with specific purposes (for instance, X-Ray astronomy which is quite scary - I've been told that a handful (5) of photons is a good detection!)
Ian Woods
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