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The Billion-Dollar Telescope
dcmeserve writes "As in all science, astronomers are ever searching for better technology to aid in their task. But when it comes to telescopes, nothing beats sheer bulk of light-gathering capability. This article gives a brief overview of the top contenders for the next leap forward, including
a 100-meter behemoth that is expected to run $1 billion."
The newer models should be capable of frying at least 2.4x10^15 ants/second, compared to Hubble's 1.8x10^13 ants.
As in all science, astronomers are ever searching for better technology to aid in their task.
This sentence doesn't make any sense but what I think you are trying to say is that all scientists want better technology. Pure mathematicians and theoretical physicists are two groups of scientists that don't rely on technology to aid them in their tasks. Please don't generalize. Some of us don't rely on gadgets to do our work for us.
Your name does not appear in the wikipedia slashdot trolling phenomena article. Try harder you must. Strong is the dark side of the force with you
The NASA plan calls for a Hubble servicing mission in 2006, possibly followed by another one a few years later, that could keep the Hubble in space far beyond even the launch of the new James Webb Space Telescope in 2011.
But after the crash of the space shuttle Columbia in February, the shuttle program has come to a grinding halt. Without servicing by the space shuttle, the Hubble is living on borrowed time.
See more here.
The bottom line with telescopes is that anything on the ground has to look through a ton of crap in the atmosphere and battle light pollution. Much smaller telescopes in space will work a lot better. ISS should have a giant telescope mounted on it. It's a shame Hubble is our only orbiting telescope.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
The answer is, using these big telescopes, we can look back in time. Light travels at a set speed in a vacuum: approximately 186,000 miles per second. The universe is so large, however, that light (and other forms of energy such as x-rays and radio waves) that was generated a bit after the creation of the universe in the big bang is just reaching us! Now, we see (and so do optical telescopes) by filtering light generated by or bouncing off of objects. So, by looking out, as far as we can, we can literally look back in time to the creation of all that is. And that, my geeky friends, is why we need giant telescopes.
Happy Stardust/Mars days :)
I'm holding out for a telescope at 550 A.U.'s, the gravitational focus of the sun.
This quote was attributed to R.A. Janek, and is the sentence that graces the page just before the beginning of Michael Crichton's novel "The Andromeda Strain". It would be most beneficial to science to see if we can use all of our technology to reduce the cost, even if only a little bit, from its(pardon the pun) astronomical level.
Neat pic, is that a drawing or a real photo?
If you're going to spend a $1B on a telescope, aren't you reaching the point where the money would be better spent to put one in space away from the atmosphere and associated debris rather than sticking it on terra firma?
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
When I was an undergraduate at University College London, we had to trek up tok to the university's observatory at Mill Hill
When were you an undergrad there? I used to teach up at Mill Hill from 1994-1997.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
In fact, it's "The Billion-Euros Telescope" which means about 20% more.
____
nico
Nico-Live
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but when you've got a lean budget you innovate.
BTW, there's this interesting other stuff in the news about Aussies seaching the heavens for likely places to host another earth.
Obligatory filching of Galaxy Song lyrics: So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
because there's bugger all down here on Earth.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
you won't be needing any unobtainable device to be able to detect the direction of the wwwinds of change, which are bullowing at gale force/farce? tell 'em robbIE? don't save everything for the interview?
Yeah, problems like resistance to collisions with massive meteors. I suppose weapons of mass destruction would be perfect for the job!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
This caught my eye:
Woah.
Am I just crazy to suggest such a thing?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
If Europe just put their space exploration teams in charge of defense, nothing would ever work, and the world would be safe.
Let's just stick our heads in the sand and be glad that western powers aren't building more bombs, because nobody else is smart enough to do that, and we're all safer without the bombs. Really.
Although they both focus, they are not giant magnifying glasses.
If the old ones will end up on Ebay? I could sure use one that could see through curtains....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
What a stupid attitude.
Solve are own planets problems? So until every single person on the planet is at what we consider a reasonable standard of living (a car, a nice big house, all the food they can eat, free medicine), we as a people should not persue scientific endevorss like travelling to space?
Scientific research improves the world for everyone. Imagine if 100 years ago we decided to do what you suggest. Our level of medical technology would still be in the dark ages as it was then. We'd have no methods of transportation to speak of, so people in 3rd world countries would be suffering even more because there would be no way to get help to them.
You are an idiot. Why don't you do something useful like devote your life to helping others instead of spewing crap here.
Why are people pouring more money into massive terrestrial telescopes when orbital hubble-like telescopes seem to be inherently superior? (or are they?)
Even better, as it's almost $1.26 to the Euro... that's $1,260,000,000!
Digital cameras will catch up to that in 2006.....
Spend the $1 billion on better things. We should try and solve our own planets problems before going out into space.
Yes, the c. $400 billion being spent on the US military has a far better chance of furthering the lot of humanity. And Bush's tax cut of $1.4 trillon sure helped out all of those disadvantaged rich people.
C'mon, weigh it up: vast amounts of money are already being spent on things which are much further down the priority list than astronomy programmes. Surely it is these which should be considered ripe for cancellation, far ahead of projects which seek to understand our place in the Universe. To quote from a particularly aposite letter which appears in today's Guardian:
Abandoning endeavours of discovery because of alleged "wastefulness", whether the target be space exploration or medieval history, will not improve matters. It will only feed the underlying shallow thinking and barbarism that have created the problems in the first place.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
It's only a billion! What you propose would take, not only trillions of dollars, but political will. Maybe I'm a skeptic but I think we need different leaders all over the world. In the meantime let's enjoy a billion dollar scope.
Please read the referenced article. All of the proposed telescopes are ground based. the people who build, maintain, and use these telescopes are also ground based. Their paychecks will be spent down here on Earth
One of the biggest problems on Earth right now is ignorance and stupidity. Spending money on increasing knowledge is a way to combat that problem.
Spending money on increasing the sum knowledge base of the entire human race is a good thing to spend money on.
What courses did you teach? We may have seen each other, I graduated in 1994
Ah, I would have just missed you; I was teaching first year in 1994 (telescope training on the Meades, and the classroom-based stuff). Out of interest, are you still in astronomy?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
While i aprrcieate your plight (wishing to see the stars again), it often serves to be more practical. Most people wish to be able to see where they are going. This requires artificial light at night, and thus you are never going to get rid of the light that metroplexs produce.
sorry
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
This is a joke, right? You should have brought up the Holocaust for a more emotional impact.
Hey hubbles lens is(or at least was a month or so ago) the smoothest man made object. We're talking about polishing a lense so that the surface bumps are smaller than transistors, and the shape is near perfect over a 10 meter or 30 meter diameter. That is where a lot of the money will go. Also, throw in a few physicists at about 80k a year, a IT guy, 60k a year, a janitor, a tour guide, a few technitians salarys for 20 years. Not to mention if something big goes wrong, your going to have to fly in experts to Chile or where ever. They aren't going to want to drop what there doing unless you pay them really well. An atomic force microscope can image at the atomic scale. It is made from a rod and a piezoelectric crystal(the same type of stuff that's in a barbeue starter). The price tag on those is about 1M, I know a lab with 3 of these guys. To get a top notch small scale lab going your looking at 1-10M. The data from the telescope will be used by hundreds of researchers.
Light emanating from earth really does'nt die out, right? So if it was possible for us to either travel faster than light or warp space time into a circle and then get a powerful enough telescope, then we should be able to see events from the past, right?
That is travel faster than light, to a long distance, turn around and then look at earth with a powerful telescope, we should be able to see kennedy getting shot? wouldnt we? Or maybe bend spacetime so that all the light which left earth years ago comes back to earth ?
I was in London back in 1993, late December, and took a few slides from my window in the Hotel Russel. I was rather impressed how lit-up the sky was with light pollution. It was a clear night but I could hardly make out any stars. Best of luck.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
-- The late Sen. Everett Dirksen (IL)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Oh yes indeed
The first North American should have stayed in Asia and fixed the problems there before risking that land bridge stuff and Newton should have been focusing on real current problems like poverty and hunger rather than pondering why things fall down.
Vacuum qualified autonomous hardware is extremely expensive. Hubble's mirror is 2.4m in diameter I think, and building/launching/running/maintaining it has cost over $2 billion. The 10m ground-based Keck observatory cost $80 million.
Astronomers want a big telescope in their lifetimes, not in the remote future when people go back to the Moon (if ever?). Its also pretty dusty and dirty up there...
The thing is, you get much more hardware for your buck on earth, since you don't have to pay x number of dollars to bring it into orbit. there are also other limitations with a space telescope - the largest bit you can put into orbit at one time, need for consumables (e.g. thruster fuel) that are hard to replenish, difficulty of maintenance/upgrades, cosmic rays etc.
active optics are already at a point of maturity that earth-based resolution is nearing that of the Hubble. by the time these monsters are being built, that technology will be even more mature.
this leaves only a few advantages for a space telescope. one is observations at wavelengths to which the atmosphere is opaque - i think these are x-ray, UV etc. (maybe IR?). with these, you basically have to build in space. the next generation space telescope i think is optimized for the IR. the success of Chandra is an example of the importance of space telescopes.
the other advantage of a space telescope might be that i can observe the whole sky, which earth bound telescopes cannot. i just don't know how feasible it is (e.g. cost in fuel spent) for major changes in orbit, to cover the whole sky. but maybe this is not a problem, i don't know.
Do not mod the parent post up! He is a troll known for posting duplicate comments in a effort to achieve greater karma. He brings nothing to this discussion. Other accounts used by this same troll are Sir Haxalot, Pingular, Steve 'Rim' Jobs, and Aens.
Please moderate him as Overrated to avoid any penalities incurred by clueless meta-moderations. This post has been brought to you by a concerned Slashdot reader who wants to keep the quality of the posts on here at their highest, including the creative trolls. Reposting comments, however, has got to go.
Still, a big honkin' ground-based telescope that you build in sections in a near-vacuum environment seems to me to be one of the more compelling reasons to finally get around to building a Lunar base.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Not really. With the rise of adaptive optics, ground-based telescopes are increasingly able to achieve diffration-limited or near-diffraction-limited resolution in the optical and (in particular) the near-IR (which is of crucial importance for cosmology -- the current "Hot" area of astronomy).
Once you hit that physics-limited level of resolution (which has been the true advantage of HST), the gains come from light-gathering ability. This is where ground-based telescopes clean up. The $$/area is much lower (i.e. better) for ground-based telescopes. And the upkeep costs are much smaller as well. Space is expensive.
When you can have a telescope with near-diffraction limited resolution and 10-1000 times the light gathering ability of a space-based telescope of the same cost, astronomer's will choose that guy any day.
Note: IAAA (I am an astronomer)
Are you suggesting that we cancel the national defense programs? Pfft...
Back on topic, there is a burning human need to explore, to further itself. At an academic level, it increases the knowledge of the race. At a practical level, it prevents eventual extinction. We gotta get off this rock eventually, no reason to wait until it's a problem IMO.
Unless you want dancing goatse.cx nastiness.
Also, mod to oblivion please.
Somebody needs to get outside.
It is extremely good to see this sort of fierce competition driving astronomy.
As open source developers, we all know the power of competition, how advances on both sides of the OS wars have driven the other to catch up or improve. If this sort of competition drives the development of telescopes then we can expect a lot of advances in science and space over the next few years
This is extremely exciting news. Maybe in years to come we will be able to see the headlines on alien newspapers.
Personally, I'd rather my tax money went on space research than megadeath hardware, or privatised transport companies that take billions of tax pounds a year to run a slow, deathtrap rail service and then have the nerve to use the subsidies to show a profit, or an increasingly corporatised health service that employs more administrators than doctors and nurses, or blatantly corrupt agricultural subsidies that pay farmers to grow *nothing* in order to fix prices, but I don't get to choose. (And nor do you, unless you're Gordon Brown.)
Maybe if Beagle 2 had actually had more government money put into it for power or payload or softer landing capabilities it wouldn't be lost in a crater on Mars right now.
You must think in Russian.
Moderators, make it a New Year's Resolution to RTFA BEFORE moderating.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Is there a usable spot for a large telescope in the US or Canada that isn't affected by light pollution?
sPh
Are you suggesting that we cancel the national defense programs?
As they say in the military, "A waste is a terrible thing to mind."
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Buddy, in some cultures you'd be in big trouble for uttering such disparaging comments about your authorities and leaders. But the West's culture of freedom allows you to do it. I'd say sharing that culture with oppressed people will help out humanity.
And I'm sure you're of the opinion that the improving economy following Bush's tax cut is just a coincidence, right?
Previously posted on October 15, 2003 by WIAKywbfatw
Here's a "close together" example:m m981104.html
http://www.estec.esa.nl/conferences/FPD/info/tos-
Here's a short paper minus images on telescope arrays:t /bthomas_ska_site.html
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/technology/future/2001oc
"The maximum extent of LOFAR is 350 km"
It seems there are proprietary astronomers who like proprietary programmers always think bigger is better when in fact smaller, more spread out is the best choice.
In principle the resolving power of a telescope depends on its diameter -- a bigger one can see finer detail -- but in practice atmospheric turbulence, the same effect that makes stars appear to twinkle, blurs the stars and erases fine detail. This is why the Hubble, even though it is not large, only about 2.4 meters (96 inches), compared with the new giants on the ground, can do breathtaking work.
The proposals sport Brobdingnagian names like the California Extremely Large Telescope, or CELT; Giant Magellan; or the Overwhelming Large Telescope, OWL, a 100-meter-diameter behemoth being contemplated by a collaboration of European nations. And their proponents promise appropriately outsized scientific results.
If you're going to spend a $1B on a telescope, aren't you reaching the point where the money would be better spent to put one in space away from the atmosphere and associated debris rather than sticking it on terra firma?
No, putting a project into space something in space is like going for the "I'd like an inch-thick gold-plate finish with diamond encrusting" when purchasing a car. Consider this: the Hubble Space Telescope cost $1.5 billion in the 1980s, for a 2.4m diameter primary mirror. If we were to scale the cost based on the diameter of the mirror, then a 100m space telescope would cost $62.5 billion, over an order of magnitude more than the proposed ground-based facility.
And don't think that ground-based telescopes are the poor cousins of space-based ones. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) can achieve resolutions better than Hubble, even if the latter had been built without the optical problems, and the VLT cost 1/10th of what Hubble did.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
It's a fucking goatse link!
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
SlashdotCEO has never even been to the UK, I guarantee it. Just a reposting troll, move along...
That is my New Year's wish.
mod down please
At what point does it become more cost effective to launch smaller space telescopes? Just curious.
I wonder why nobody is talking about a lunar-based telescope. It seems that would give you the best of both worlds: pretty much no atmospheric interference, but with a modicum of gravity so a human crew could be there for extended periods.
Am I just crazy to suggest such a thing?
No, you're not crazy to suggest such a thing; you're crazy for saying that nobody is talking about it, hehe.
Seriously, it does get discussed in the astrophysics community, and there are people who are enthusiastic about it. In the end, it comes down to what you want to spend your money on. Right now, high redshift optical and IR observations are not as limited by atmospheric distortion as they are by the ability to collect a lot of light, which in turn is limited by the collecting area of the telescope. Building your telescope on the Moon wouldn't appreciably change the collecting area required.
With a fixed pot of funds, and the incredible expense of safely lifting the components of a large telescope to the moon, assembling the telescope there, and then operating/maintaining it, the maximum size of your telescope just got a lot smaller. Is what you gain in image resolution by going to the moon worth what you lose in what, and how far away, you can see? Right now, so much of the interesting optical and IR observations are aperture limited, and so most observers' answer to that question is no.
You're not going to get rid of it completely, but there are steps to reduce it immensely: just covering the tops of street and park lights (i.e. no more of those white globe lights) does wonders - the intensity of the light that's reflected up into the sky from the streets' asphalt is miniscule compared to the amount of light that's emitted straight up into it if the light lacks a covered top (and as a bonus you'll get better light down on the ground where it's needed)...
I ams so fucking drunk tht I wouldfuck my sister.
It seems to me that if multiple cheaper, smaller telescopes could work together, they could do the work of a single gigantic telescope. I mean, if you combine how ever many small telescopes it takes to get the same input area as the 100m monster, then you could probably get similar power.
In IT we have known about the power of doing distributed processing for some time, perhaps we should let the astronomers in on the secret?
Someone, please, educate me on why bigger is better...(please limit your comments to the subject matter at hand).
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
An interesting tidbit about very large lenses and mirrors is that in some instances it can take months and even years for the molten glass to cool inside the mold, and that supposedly it's such an intricate process that only few places in the world can manufacture them.
You could also say the economy is improving because of the removal of his father from the white house.
All in all, we are still left with less total jobs than what were available three years ago combined with falling wages. I only see improvement for the C?O's in the near future.
It has to be done very slowly to so that stress doesn't develop in the thick glass from uneven or rapid cooling.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
He was never an undergrad there. He just copied a post someone else made months ago. Please try not to encourage him, he has enough problems as it is.
Several people have commented that the money may be better spent on a space telescope. Here's why that may not be true:
Advantages of space:
* Extremely low light pollution and air absorption. This means you can see very dim things that may not be ever visible from the ground.
Advantages of ground:
* Initial cost is about 100-1000 times cheaper for same-sized primary
* Repairs and routine maintenance are possible without a $250 million shuttle launch
* Newer technology is possible, since it's less risky. Hubble uses a lot of electronics from the early 1980s.
Hubble cost $1.5 billion initially plus $0.25 billion per year (http://hubble.nasa.gov/faq.html) for a 2.5-meter telescope.
Since light-collecting power goes as the square of the diameter, a 100-meter telescope has 1600 times the light collecting ability of Hubble. So, if the celestial objects of interest are not background-limited, you can get the same quality image in 1 minute that would take Hubble a whole day to acquire.
It is amazing what we US taxpayers allow our government to spend money on. Apperently, B2 bombers and such are more important than science to the average American. Says a lot, really.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
...ideally CCD chips would be embedded into the lense -- certainly a molecular nanotechnology based manufacturing process would greatly improve precision here. This would yield resolution improvement in the realm of orders of magnitude. If all goes according to schedule I will be giving an introduction to this and other issues at sdfcon-1 in Las Vegas this coming June entitled Green Astronomy: Paradigms and Solutions for a Sustainable Future Peace, SA Thigpen KL1FE
Interferometry is what you are thinking of and it requires a clock synchronization that is proportional to the wavelength being observed (don't have the exact math on hand). This is already done in radio astronomy but radio frequencies are far lower than visual light requencies. Visual light interfereometry has been tried but currently can't compete with big single observers.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Arizona state in the US has some of the most stringent light controls anywhere. They were enacted a few years ago and I remember hearing the complaints by some and the new light designs to help reach the goals while addresssing the complaints.
Overall, better light designs (shielded from to prevent upward light, more directed lighting, etc) can keep both parties happy.
There's an article on cnn about it from way back when. Googling will also show some of the light designs that are working.
J
In other news, Big Ass Spork was found dead today at 27. Having fallen on a greased up Yoda doll, he suffered fatal internal wounds. His many contributions to [nerd]pop-culture will continue to endear him to future generations, truly an American icon.
I do it wrong
Laying here in the shadows of my room, I squint up at my love. My Ms. Portman. I am sore and tired after fucking her for eight solid hours. My chapped and aching dick is soaking in grits to relieve the pain. She gets on her knees and starts lapping the grits up out of the bowl. She places her beautiful hands on my penis and starts to lick the grits off my achy piece.
Massaging my nutsack she....
WAIT, I DO IT WRONG!!!!
Yanking my dick out of her mouth I throw her to the ground and shove it in to her gaping freshly fisted ass. [goatse.cx]
OH BIG ASS SPORK!! Fuck my ass, fuck my ass good. DEEPER, my stallion, deeper!! Make a Beowulf cluster of sperm on my back!!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of this baby!
I DO IT WRONG!!!!
I continue to hump her alabaster form. Glistening with beads of sweat, she bites her lip in delight as I tear her ass open with my engorged dick.
Queen Amidala!! I shreik as I near climax.
She looks up at me and screams, You are so alive in me, unlike *BSD or VA Software!!! Fill me with seed!! Yes, Yes, Yess!!!!
For me you are calling, hhhmmm?
YODA?!? What the fuck, can't you see I am using the force here?
He savagely kicks my Natalie aside, he pulls out his large green penis and impales me...
I DO IT WRONG!!
All your sporkz are belong to the dead homiez!!
Proof of the gay-linux conspiracy!
filthy critic
that 100-meter monster sure looks brutal.
:-)
sometimes i regret having chosen CS for my degree... sure it's great fun and you can do lots of cool things with computers but man... standing beside one of those monster bridges or buildings or planes or boats or telescopes and knowing that you built it must be awesome
I'd say sharing that culture with oppressed people will help out humanity.
Interesting definition of "sharing culture" you have there. Sort of like the way Europeans "shared" their culture with the poor backward natives of the Americas, right?
And I'm sure you're of the opinion that the improving economy following Bush's tax cut is just a coincidence, right?
Well, my guess would be the improvements are about as real as Enron's profits. After all, they're just numbers in a news report until they start being reflected in real Americans' paychecks. I'm sure Dubya learned plenty of neat accounting tricks from his friend Ken Lay to help his administration cook the books and make the economy look better than it is.
You can make a cluster of telescopes, the technique is called interferometry. However, combining the results from individual dishes requires painstaking detail. The lengths of the signal paths must be matched to a degree less than the wavelength of the signals. For radio astronomy this has been done for a long time, because the wavelengths are quite manageable. The optical equivalents are only quite recent and not that widely deployed, but here is one example that I know of.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
"Spend the $1 billion on better things. We should try and solve our own planets problems before going out into space."
Earth is great. I like it a lot. But we have all of our eggs (people, plants, animals, etc.) in just the one basket (Earth).
While we have a tendency to believe the Earth is solid and unchanging, we have a lot of evidence around us that this is not really the case. We have meteors, volcanoes, micro-organisms and even the occasional nuke build-up that could spoil everyone's day. And it could happen very soon.
While we're busy improving the Earth we all love, we should also do what we can to put some of our eggs go into another basket. That way if the one we currently have should get broke, we'll have eggs left in reserve to help build back up our little chicken farm.
People can think of all kinds of reasons to study space, visit Mars, etc., but I always look at it as house insurance. As long as the price isn't too high, you'd be a fool not to buy it. We have a 2-3 trillion dollar economy. How much house insurance do you think we can afford?
TW
I am sure you would rather that human sacrafice was still practiced in central america correct?
Actually if you could play the "what if" game Native Americans are alot better off as the result of the arriving of the Europeans than without - little things like doubling or tripling life expectancy, plumbing, heating, sight correction, education, year around supply of food, etc.
'nuff said.
A meter is a device. A metre is a unit of measure. This SHOULDN'T be difficult stuff.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Such as in the US, right?
"Americans...need to watch what they say"
Most modern astronomical scopes use mirrors. For professional work, refractors haven't been used much outside of solar observing for decades. They are just too damn heavy.
:)
Just an FYI. Reflectors - mirror-based scopes are the norm outside of Walmart.
I would also like to comment that 1 orbit of HST costs about $100 thousand. Thats a lot of money for 90 minutes of time around the world
I don't get it. If nothing travels faster than light, how did we, i.e. the Earth, beat the light out here to be waiting to see it?
I mean, isn't one of the main idea behind the big bang is that everything was in single giant ball before it exploded, creating all the stars and galaxies?
So how does this work then? Any astrophysicsts reading slashdot today care to explain? Thanks.
Its also pretty dusty and dirty up there...
So? There's no atmosphere to move the dust around.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
And I'm sure you're of the opinion that the improving economy following Bush's tax cut is just a coincidence, right?
A tax cut is good if your problem is investment. This was not the case in the US. The "boom" in the economy is mainly due to the war in Iraq (money spent on Iraq don't go to Iraqi people but to american corporations), other money pumped into the economy by the government (you do realize that one day someone will have to pay for the deficit) and because the dollar is falling like a rock.
The tax cut in itself was bad for the economy but as long as Bush is using it's credit card, people like you believe won't understand it.
by combining telescopes you can get the resolution benefits of a huge telescope, however, you will not get the same photon collecting ability which you need for very dim objects.
So yes, you can see very big bright objects with astounding clarity using your idea. But dim things, nope.
Oh, and its called interferometry and is actually one of the first instances of 'distributed' computing, long before it became a slashdot topic (and before slashdot was around). Its early implementations were localized sine they were limited by the lack of a reliable global high speed networks, though nowadays with the internet and internet2 its more feasible to do on a continental scale. If memory serves it wasn't until around 1990 that they were able to do an experiment using telescopes on opposite sides of the planet...
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A few years back I flew from Oregon to California, over some mountain passes to Texas, and from there to South Carolina in an L-3 Aeronca. (Piper Cub- 75mph on a good day) Believe, there is a whole lot of nothing out there. There are huge chunks of the south western United States that are bone dry and sunny almost every day.
I doubt a lot of it will be usable because of logistical factors. From what I remember, the ground was either flat, hard, and dry, or it wasbroken and impassable to non-donkey based transports.
Getting people to Chile via commercial airlines and then flying them out to the Atacama can't be much more expensive than flying them to Reno and then using a truck or an expensive helicopter to get them on site.
I'm not sure about shipping the big components during construction. One way or the other you're gonna probably have to use heavy lift helicopters to finish the job either way. Those are seriously expensive.
Anyway, there is a lot of worthless land in the u.s., but 10 miles of the Sierra Nevadas is harder to deal with than hundreds of mile sof high plains. Distance != Difficulty
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
the mirror are so large and focused on such long distance objects, all the supports and equipment do is reduce the photons by a very slight amount. to compare, hold the end of a paperclip as close to your eye as you're comfortable with, and look off into the distance. You'll hardly notice its there.
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They are talking about it, actually. :-)=
[TMB]
It could be worse, it could cost One Hundred...Millllllllion....Dollars!!!!
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
You can't get rid of it completely, true. However light pollution can certainly be curtailed. Proper full-cutoff light fixtures ensure that more light is directed downward on to the street--where it does some good--rather than up to the sky--where it annoys astronomers.
Hawaii is not exactly uninhabited, but they make regular and concerted efforts to limit light pollution because of the observatories on Mauna Kea. As an added bonus, reducing light pollution saves energy--those expensive photons end up directed mostly where they are needed, rather than being lost.
~Idarubicin
A Lunascope. Screw wasting our time with piddling Terrascopes that are subject to all sorts of crappy conditions, interference, etc. Just suck it up, make the capital outlay among a bunch of nations, and plant a sucker on the far side of the moon. You know we could do it remotely with rockets, etc. and have this thing kicking it in no time.
-rt
Why reinevent the wheel? I'm sure we can get a few cast off texts from their old library holdings. Has no one thought to ask them out in Area 51?
I'll be brief. Let them build it on the moon!
Keeper of the terrible karma ---
C'mon, weigh it up: vast amounts of money are already being spent on things which are much further down the priority list than astronomy programmes.
Reducing the level of taxation by $1.4 trillion is "spending" money? A tax cut is a reduction in revenues, not an expenditure. Nobody's "spent" anything.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Yeah the conditions in Guantanamo Bay are so horrible. That's what the Taliban who were being held in Afghan prisons by the new government begged the US to take them to Guantanamo Bay.
Get a brain.
To witness President Kennedy being shot, you'd have to be a little over 40 light years from Earth. If you imagine the light which depicted instants of time on Earth as being like photographs which are shot into space, then every second another would be "dispatched" and would currently be 40 light years out.
But consider that the Earth is constantly rotating. Every "photograph" would be fired off at a slightly different angle. And over a distance of 40 light years, the differences in angle would mean that the "photographs" would be huge distances apart.
So it might be possible to go to a point 40 light years away and peek at the Earth, to see a specific instant in time... but only that instant, because the light depicting the next instant went off in a different direction, and so on.
One is tempted to think that you could just "orbit" the Earth at an altitude of 40 light years to watch things unfold in sequence, but intuition or simple geometry will reveal that you'd have to be going really, really fast to match the Earth's rotation at that distance.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
These guys are all idiots.
They're wasting money and time spending "a billion" dollars on a telescope, and the guys in California are making one too.
They should spend it all on setting up a new MOON mission. And then build an el cheapo telescope there.
Cuz we all know that on the moon the atmosphere is minimal and it wouldn't obstruct astronomer's views much at all.
Radiation will be easy to block on the moon since it's so close. We can send hundreds of unmanned drones to drop off equipment (like LEAD) on to the surface of the moon. Setup small nuclear power plants like the one for Galena Alaska. The Toshiba Mini Nuke. This could run lighting for hydroponics, air recycling systems and water recycling systems inside the moon base for DECADES.
The base could grow their own food, heat up lead to fill up the base interior for radiation shielding and have a pretty darn neat setup.
Sure this may take about 10 years of planning and 20 years of actual implementation and the project cost of maybe 100 billion dollars.
But imagine the fact that the world has finally gotten off its ass to put a base on the frickin' moon!
I almost hate to say this, but is there any good reason to put a telescope in the UK at all? I'd think that between the population density and the weather it would be easier and more effective to access some telescope on a remote mountain top over the Internet. Unfortunately that would leave out most amateurs, but do most universities have access to such facilities?
Yes, the c. $400 billion being spent on the US military has a far better chance of furthering the lot of humanity. And Bush's tax cut of $1.4 trillon sure helped out all of those people.
Great points! Any money going to the military is definitely well spent! And Bush's tax cuts have done huge benefits for stimulating this economic boom underway. Glad you understand this and aren't the typical whiney leftie slashdotter who has no clue about economics nor the military.
Don't forget, exposure time above the atmosphere is limited by background cosmic ray saturation.
Cutting down light pollution is practical, any light going up and is no use to anyone. Putting a simple reflectors on top of street lights a) cuts the light pollution b) gives more light for people to see where there going and/or c) reduces the amount of power you need to provide a given lighting level (reducing CO2 production). Would you really miss thoes trendy spherical street lights that send 50% of their light straight up?
oh, I might add that the low gravity of the moon would make the telescope portion of the base much cheaper to build, I mean damn man, it's not going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a computer-controlled support setup to prevent mirrors from sagging like an old pair of melons.
Time it takes to get it up there? Well shoot, NASA took how long to get a man in the moon in the first place?
Instead of using cutting edge designs, just settle with setting up a base. Then from there use the base as a staging point for planning and creation.
There are millions of people wanting to become astronauts! Sure not everyone can fly a space shuttle, but at least you can hire space construction workers or scientists. Have them enlist in a SPACE branch of the military service and pay them peanuts($0.23 an hour), if they don't make it through the training, send them back home with no ties to the military a-la washout lane from Starship Troopers.
Speaking of which, they had a whole lunar base made of a geosynchronous orbiting ring, I think that's a great project also, a little more expensive than possible, but it's cool!
Alright, so maybe 100 billion dollars is a little conservative, but right now we have the underlying technologies to setup any sort of venture we want to the moon. We can charge it on George W Bush's CEO American Express card. It has no limit! (as long as you pay it off in a month)
Our Deficit is big enough as it is, why not add another measely trillion dollars to it?
No need to say again the reasons why this isn't feasible (yet) the way you say. Just wanted to show a link to another interferometer: the VLTI
That machine is so delicate that we weren't allowed to walk near the tunnels (you see them on the picture) when I was visiting the site.
Cheers...
No, it's another bit of bird poo!
This thing looks like it'll be a bitch to clean, and I though my 120mm was a pain! Really puts things into perspective.
I know this is a totally overworked question, but can anyone tell me, with all of this other expenditure in space exploration, failed missions to mars to discover whether it is inhabitable or not - why have we not returned to the moon yet?? Why do we have a long-standing space station orbiting the earth, and no station on the moon?
In addition to the replies that have already gone up to your post, I might point out that these new giant telescope *are* distributed smaller scopes. All of the designs I have seen as well as older scopes such as Keck are a bunch of smaller mirrors bundled together. The 100m OWL isn't going to have a giant mirror but a field of smaller reflective elements. Mirrors like the one in Palomar are about as big as single mirrors are going to get with present technology. The difficulties in trying to make a stable optical element that big are nearly as ridiculous as back in the 50's.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Who modded that up? The link is already given in the article.
Instead of wasting money on these good for nothing projects, they can clean up the homeless in the cities and give them decent human habitations to live. stupid people in the government.
Before everybody starts a whine about the billion they expect the OWL to build and operate for 20 years, bear in mind we spent about that amount just for airconditioned storage of the hubbel before it was finally put up due to delays in shceduling the launch after 1987's disaster.
:)
OTOH, look at what its found for us. Much of that information is new, some of it has had cosmology shaking results, and all of it is extremely pretty to look at. As an american taxpayer, we have gotten our money back in scientific information many tmes over.
I hope the OWL becomes a reality in my remaining lifetime.
Some things are priceless, for everything else there is always MasterCard
--
Cheers, Gene
ISS leaks air and other gasses. It is surrounded by a gas bubble. Any telescope in the area would have these gasses condensing on it's mirror.
That reminded me of a question I've had for a long time. What happens when an astonaut farts in a space station? Does it kind of visibly float around? Do the female astronauts squeek some out and deny they did it while the guys are enjoying lighting-off zero-G stinkies with matches?
Why not Put that Billion Dollars into the public health system..
Even if we built a moon base, there is no way that in 30 years we'd be able to build up sufficient technological industry and infrastructure to construct an entire telescope on the moon out of lunar materials. That leaves shipping it up to the Moon to be operated by people there, which is far more expensive to launch and operate than a space telescope.
Parent is +5 Insightful, if a bit optimistic (re: last paragraph).
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Mod parent up!
Even though I am not an astronomer, I can appreciate the effects of light pollution. After being shown a video on light pollution when visiting an observatory, I came to realize what a terrible problem this is for the urban and suburban areas of the world.
It became more apparent after visiting Kauai, HI for a week not long after seeing the video. The island is inhabited, but just barely, and is only supported by the tourist population. The island is composed mostly of small villages spaced roughly 15 miles apart. After 6pm, the entire island appears deserted, as the tourists return to their resorts, and the (few) locals go home. It was about 8 o'clock, and I was driving on the road. The first thing you notice is how DARK everything is. The sky really IS black and you can see all the stars (but not nearly as good as my other experience - see below). Anyhow, you could tell when you were approaching another car in the opposing direction about 5 minutes before you acutally passed it due to the change in color of the sky.
"Wow. It looks like there's a big village ahead. Maybe THAT one will have a supermarket..."
5 minutes later...
"Damn. It's just a BMW"
Last summer, for the first time in my life, I had the chance to view the milky way with my naked eyes for the first time in my life. It was in the middle of nowhere in upstate NY - at least 15 miles from the nearest trace of civilization, and is an experience I will keep with me for the rest of my life. It was the last day of a small trek with several of my friends, and the first day with no clouds in the sky. The magnificence of it is too great to describe with words. It is something which I believe that every person must experience at some time in his life. We stood there, silent for what seemed like an eternity and yet also like a fleeting moment. We would have laid down and slept atop the hill in the clearing had it not been for a pesky group of bears...
Go. Go outdoors. Get away into the mddle of nowhere. Spend some time. Get to know yourself. Look up.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Come on, I can't believe none of you AC's noticed... First, please use these links instead:
Science with 100m telescopes - PDF Version
Science with 100m telescopes - HTML Version
Second, the AC modded as Troll is using a web redirect for the second link, which explains the confusion about whether he's posting a goatse image or not. Sometimes, it points to one, other times it doesn't. By the way, the first link of the parent was broken and corrected now.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Moderators, make it a New Year's Resolution to RTFA BEFORE moderating.
.ws site that's probably under his control so he can change to Goatse when he get modded up.
They probably did and it probably pointed to the actual article back then. If you look at the URL, it doesn't directly point to the Google Cache, but to some weird
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I don't know about him, but I certainly am - I feel the tax cut will in the long run hurt the economy as increased demand for money causes interest rates the rise. The economy would have come back without the tax cut - it's cyclical, and always has been. Bush didn't have jack to do with it. Not to mention the total screwing we're all going to get when the baby-boomers retire and the government has to start paying for their retirements...
Why?
i said the project cost would be about 100 billion dollars. I never said the telescope would be built, it's just the beginning of the project, basically just to build the base there and then the beginnings of industry. imagine opening it up to commercial contracts though. People from all over the world would want to donate money and supplies and lucrative contracts to build the industry required to mine, refine, and manufacture materials from the moon!
I'll be able to see right up Martian chicks' skirts!
What you're talking is called Very Large Scale Interferometry, and has been done for decades... What do you think the OGR project is for? Optimal Golomb Rulers are used to most efficiently space multiple telecopes in an array for best resolution. Look at the VLA in New Mexico. It has the resolution of a single telescope 22 MILES across, and is as sensitive as a 130-meter dish.
A billion dollar telescope...
...uh...take pictures of stars and shit like that. ...uh... stars and shit."
One hundred million taxpayers in the USA...
So let's try a little thought experiment, a government bureaucrat goes to each and every one of these taxpayers and says,
"I'm gonna drop a ten dollar bill on the floor and walk away. I'll come back in fifteen minutes and if it is still there I'll use it to buy a big-ass telescope that will things like
If you reach down and pick up the money well then it's yours and you can do whatever you want with it. After all it came out of your taxes anyway...
But you won't have any big-ass telescope and no pictures of
So would you not just pick up your money and leave? Would anyone not do that?
In that case, who decided that a billion dollars should be spent to buy a big-ass telescope?
If you want a big telescope, buy your own big telescope. Don't take taxpayers money for this kind of thing. You guys are making it difficult to convince the civilized people of the world that middle-aged white men should be taken seriously.
We will split that light into a spectra (the rainbow of the light bouncing off that planet), and the spectra will tell us if there is life on that planet.
It's stunning really, just 20 years ago we thought that might never be possible, now it's just a matter of doing it.
-pyrrho
Keep i mind that when this was built, the Euro was worth a lot less then it is now. It has only recently taken on such value.
1 Billion? Save about 800 million and go mercury
http://www.astro.ubc.ca/LMT/lzt/
lisa bonet ate no basil
It's not really that hard .. as a kid, I saw the Milky Way fairly regularly from my parents' back yard. We were technically just outside the city limits, but there wasn't a street light for miles, so the sky was very dark.
So I'm not too impressed with the Way itself, but the sheer quantity of stars up there still takes me by surprise. Between any two stars, no matter how faint, you can always find another star.
But what's depressing is that all these stars are burning their energy simultaneously. In only a few dozen billion years, it'll all be gone.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Raw resolution and light gathering ability matters for some projects, but wavelength also matters.
The advent of CCD-based astronomy has relegated light pollution to mere nuisance level. It's effects can be dramatically reduced by chopping the steering mirror, or longer integration times. I'm more interested in how they plan on preventing feedback loops and other nasty behaviour in a system with FOUR fully active mirrors (each of which has zillions of transducers on it). Seems messy.
So I guess they won't be able to ask for that "tera-pixel" digital camera to go with it, eh?
"mine's bigger", indeed.
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
In order to resolve small items at a distance, you need to focus light from large apertures. The larger the aperture, the smaller the item which can be resolved. To resolve Kennedy from 40 light years out, your going to need a damn big telescope. One of those "600X MAGNIFICATION" units from Wal-Mart is not going to cut it.
Just imagine the angular resolution you are desiring. Imagine an acute triangle, 1 foot on the small side (to see Kennedys head), and 1.24153916 x 10^18 feet on each of the long sides (== 40 light years). I'd calculate the angle subtended, but anything I own will show ZERO degrees. Lets say it's sufficiently close to zero that your going to need an infinitely large telescope to see it.
FYI, 10 arcminutes is about 1/3 the diameter of the Moon or Sun. So this camera could take 9 trillion pixel mosaics of the Moon. (Though they'd probably be damn scared to point that much aperture at a full moon...)
10 arcminutes is about 1/12th the diameter of the long dimension of the Andromeda galaxy as seen from here. This telescope could make 36 trillion pixel mosaics of Andromeda. That would look nice blown up to Times Square size.
This means that those with the money (congress) like it. The administrators like it because here is a project that has made good (albeit after a bumpy start). When an administrator chooses to invest in an existing project, it is lower risk than something new.
NASA has budget problems, but please remember that a lot of it is coming from the bad decisions made on the manned space program. At the same time, without a manned program, Hubble wouldn't be there.
Lets put this into perspective, NASA in a year uses than what it takes to run the US part of the Iraq occupation for a month. I feel for your budget problems, but in reality, NASA is underfunded for what it does.
The article didn't even mention the 9.2-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope in west Texas, which was built at a fraction of the cost required by other similarly-sized telescopes. (HET cost only $13.5 million.) The most notable cost-savings being that the telescope is always at a constant tilt, and is only configured for spectroscopy, not imaging. But for sheer size-of-light-bucket per dollar, such a design is hard to beat. There are also plans to build a much larger version of the HET --- I forgot how big and I have no URLs to share, but the new telescope would be at least as large as those mentioned in the article.
Ok, I was wrong. But I am not a troll. Who is moderating this place?
When you reduce revenues you can otherwise collect, the effect is the same as if you spent it. For example, when I get to reduce the amount of income taxes I because I pay interest on my mortgage, it is the exact same thing financially as if the federal government paid money to my mortgage holder. Part of the problem with the federal budget (eg the massive growing deficit) is due to the fact that they don't consider it spending when it is just that. It's like giving the money away and saying that you didn't spend it. Maybe not technically, but that money's gone. Whether you got something worthwhile out of it is up for debate.
I say no since the tax cut didn't put very much actual money into the economy. The bulk of the cuts don't even come into affect until next year so I can't see how they could've stimulated the economy this past year, especially since the vast majority of the cuts would go into the hands of those already so well off that they wouldn't put it into the economy again very quickly.
IAAE (I am an economist).
I think it would be good for the Europeans to build a 100 meter telescope in Europe. Then, we can come back to the USA and tell the Republicans that the French are building a bigger telescope than we have, and with that technology they might be able to monopolize marketing opportunities in space. With that one sentence, America will commit to building its own 150 meter ground based 5 billion dollar telescope, plus a 10 meter orbiting telescope for good measure, and science will improve dramatically on both continents!
This is my sig.
But seriously, this is about the cost of three or four space shuttle missions. The choice is ours: Study how ants build colonies in zero G for this price, or discover earth like planets around other stars..
Eat at Joe's.
Hubble can also see well into the IR, which is *also* impossible using ground based telescopes
Idiot. What the hell do you think the initials in "UKIRT" stand for?
In any case, sure there are needs for space-based telescopes, especially in the UV. However, the point I was making is that for optical telescopes, it is perfectly possible to build competitive solutions on Earth, at a fraction of the cost of space-based mission. The same applies to radio and submm telescopes, which is why we have facilities like the VLA, Arecibo, the JCMT, ALMA etc etc.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
..city lighting is important too. The orange sodium lamps, seen in much of London, are prefered because they emit light in a limited range, allowing astronomers the rest of the spectrum.
Sure, if all they want are zenith observations. Liquid-metal scopes have some pretty serious disadvantages; chiefly, the fact that you can't aim them.
You're absolutely right, but for the wrong reason.
With the current state of our space program, we can't launch a mission to a moon for a mere $1B dollars, much less build and maintain a telescope there. But we *should* by now have had a space program that regularly conducts manned moon missions, possibly with an outpost or two there as well. Instead, we've spend the last 30 years obsessed over a fancy launch vehicle that is hideously over-expensive and delicate *just* so we can land it like an airplane.
So in other words, yes, it should have been possible to build an "el cheapo" telescope on the moon by now, with the ability to maintain it for less than the cost of overcoming the atmospheric disturbances and higher gravity on Earth.
But it's not, so the telescopes proposed are in fact the cheapest alternatives for their size.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
Is there a usable spot for a large telescope in the US or Canada that isn't affected by light pollution?
Not in North America, but all the light pollution maps show a great location in Asia.
It's a very short drive (as the missile flies) due North of a major commercial center, but the skies are amazingly dark. It's as though there were no industry at all -- at least, not the kind that requires nighttime illumination.
There are even reasonably high mountains, complete with pre-existing infrastructure. And during the astronomers' free time, there's a nearby "Treasure House of Wildlife!"
After all, our entire planet is but a miniscule speck of dust in the cosmos. Why should we let a little treaty matter stand in the way of discovery?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Not to mention the total screwing we're all going to get when the baby-boomers retire and the government has to start paying for their retirements...
Well I don't know about you, but I'm hoping this doomsday arrives sooner rather than later. When they're retiring in full force, then we'll have to confront that problem. And come up with a more sane policy than pumping cash out of their kids to pay for their retirements...