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Antarctic Telescope Funded
An anonymous reader writes "SpaceflightNow reports that a multi-institutional team of scientists led by the University of Chicago will receive $16.6 million from the National Science Foundation over the next five years to build a telescope at the South Pole aimed at piercing one of the darkest secrets of the universe. The telescope will help scientists to reveal new details regarding a mysterious phenomenon called dark energy, which makes the expansion of the universe accelerate."
To learn more about this work and to develop the background that would satisfy your curiosity, I suggest taking the time to do some research, e.g. by checking out the websites for the principles involved in this project. There's also some excellent cosmological primers available on the web that go over some of this stuff; see e.g. Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial (here and especially here) as well as Wayne Hu's Introduction to the Cosmic Microwave Background.
To go through your concerns one by one:
1. The U.S., in concert with other nations, already maintains an extensive set of scientific facilities in Antarctica, in the form of permanent bases at the South Pole and at McMurdo Sound and Palmer Station. These facilities are manned and operated year-round. Their purpose is to provide logistical support for the scores of short- and long-term scientific projects that take place in Antarctica, such as the one described in this article. In other words, the issue of logistical support for such a project in Antarctica really isn't an issue; an entire organizational/logistical apparatus has been running for many years to provide this capability for science as a whole, and they'll only be one of many projects each year that will take advantage of it.
2. There is already a significant amount of observational evidence for the presence of what's referred to here as "dark energy." One hint of the presence of such an energy component to the Universe comes from trying to reconcile two observations: the first is that cosmic microwave background data indicates that the large-scale geometry of space is flat; the second is that the matter density of the universe (both in baryons, or normal matter, and in unknown dark matter, not to be confused with "dark energy"), measured via a broad variety of techniques, can only provide about 20% of the mass-energy density required to make the large-scale geometry be as flat as is observed. What's the other 80%? If it can't be matter of some sort, then what is it? When this is combined with recent observations that the expansion of the universe is accelerating -- something only possible if such a "dark energy" component to the mass-energy density of the universe is present -- one is forced to take this possibility seriously. (there's a lot more to be said about this issue, but only if someone cares)
3. The telescope will not solely look at one spot on the sky.
4. Lighting is not really an issue; this is not a visible light telescope, but rather a microwave telescope. There are significant noise issues that will have to be confronted in the data analysis, but not really from day vs. night problems.