Fourth and Final 'Great Observatory' To Launch Soon

Uosdwis writes "The New York Times (FRYYY) has an article about SIRTF, the fourth and last 'Great Observatory'. It is a Space based Infra Red Telescope Facility which will extend the work of The Hubble telescope, The Compton Gamma Ray telescope and The Chandra X-Ray telescope. SIRTF is quite an amazing project using new ideas such as an Earth Trailing starting from an L1 orbit, and cooling only the intruments. Saved tax payers over $1 billion in redesigns. Check it out!"

Comments

archive.nytimes.com

[breon.halling]

Here's the article -- no registration needed.

If you ever need to check a NYTimes article, replace "www.nytimes.com" with "archive.nytimes.com" in the URL.

There are four?

[sketerpot]

I really had no idea that there were four of these Great Observatories, since the only one I've ever heard about is the Hubble telescope. Perhaps radio telescopes and other things outside of the visible spectrum don't sound as exciting.

I like the idea of space telescopes---but I also like the idea of better earth based telescopes, since I think that they're going to be the most practical until we get a space elevator or something. We can make stars stop shimmering with adaptive optics, and we can get the resolving power of a telescope with a mirror a mile wide with interferometry, which would be impractical to build in space. Long vacuum-filled pipes between telescopes and mirrors aligning the light waves to be in phase are, to me, just as exciting as a single "great observatory"; moreso, perhaps, since the interferometric observatories can be constructed more cheaply (and so it will be easier for astronomers to get time on them).

Re:There are four?

[barakn]

Interferometers in space will experience less noise than down here and can be made much larger. In particular, instruments for gravity wave detection like LISA, which will be 5 million km on a side. And the other 2 are great observatories are the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. You never wanted X-ray glasses?

Represent, my brothers

[Anonymous Coward]

...The Compton Gamma Ray telescope...

Glad to see a little representation from down the way. That's whassup.

Not the LAST

[HyPeR_aCtIvE]

The writing of the slashdot article makes it sound like this is the LAST Great Observatory that NASA is doing, and then is closing it's doors on that subject. Not so. It happens to be the last of the original 4 proposed ones in the 1970's. But others will come and go. For example, the planned 'replacement' for Hubble. Known as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), formerly known as the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST). Find out whatever you wish to know about it at: http://jwstsite.stsci.edu/

Re:Not the LAST

[Anonymous Coward]

This *is* the last 'Great Observatory' and it is closing the doors on the project which created these four telescopes. The article didn't say NASA was not going to make telescopes anymore, just the project was ending. JWST is a telescope, and it could be great, but it was not proposed under the 'GO' project, it was it's own singular project(won by TRW & Ball Aerospace.) The 'GO' projects are the first to choose these parts of the EM spectrum, JWST will produce more science from newer tech but it uses HST & SIRTF as baselines.

Re:Not the LAST

[remou]

beyond moon orbit for the JWST???

Which probably means neither repair nor
upgrade possibilities like with hubble...

a sunshield the size of a tennis court???

good thing there's less space trash in that
far off orbit...:-)

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying