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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.
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 :)
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.
Theoretical physicists do to. They use all kinds of computer programs to map and model possible situations. One of the biggest linux clusters in the world is being used by theoretical phycisists to try and model a fusion reaction.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
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?
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
Am I just crazy to suggest such a thing?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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...
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.
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.
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.
-- The late Sen. Everett Dirksen (IL)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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...
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
Here is a link that mentions it.
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.
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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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
oy.
The big bang was not an explosion of stuff out into a pre-existing space. It was an explosion of space itself.
See This link: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/balloon0.html
The important point in this case is that there is no "center" where the big bang happened. Any direction you look, you are looking back to the big bang... which happened EVERYwhere.
The best description I've read of this is in "Wrinkles In Time" by George Smoot, which tells the story of the COBE mission.
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
Short answer: yes.
As others have pointed out, there are lots of wide-open spaces in North America. I've seen black night skies in many remote parts of Canada, and the desert southwest U.S. One fascinating trip last year was to an outfit out in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico that had cool telescopes you could use and dark skies. A blast, in other words.
A couple of other points on location:
Too far north and you lose dark skies in the summer. Midnight twilight north of 49 degrees, midnight sun in the Arctic. I spent my teens at 53 north and never saw real darkness in the summer.
South is good if you like looking at our galaxy. The center of the Milky Way is in the direction of Sagittarius, low in the sky from here (Vancouver, 49 north), but overhead from Australia or Chile. This also gets you the Centaurus/Vela/Carina segment of the Milky Way, which is stunning to look at and full of goodies. As an added bonus you get two satellite galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds.
...laura
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!
In particular, there seems to have been an agreement made some years ago between whatever entity handles the summit for astronomy (probably the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy) and some native groups (mountaintops are sacred places) under which the astronomy folks got permission to build a certain number (int) of telescopes.
That many have now been built. The astronomy folks would like to build more. And... various folks (natives and others) are noting that um, no, that's not what they agreed to. So there's been a lot of paperwork, environmental impact statements, and so on.
In some cases, things are a little grey-area-ish. They want to build "outriggers" on the sides of the Keck scopes, for example. And the Smithsonian-Sinica.tw-Harvard submillimetre array - does that count as 8 scopes, since there are 8 dishes, or 1, since it's an interferometer?
As it now stands, though, Mauna Kea wins lots of astronomy pissing matches. :) It has the 2 largest optical scopes in the world (Keck and Keck II), plus the 4th largest (Subaru) and another in the top 10 (Gemini North), the largest single submillimeter telescope (James Clerk Maxwell) and I think the largest dedicated infrared telescope (UKIRT).
If someone wanted to build a truly monster scope on Mauna Kea, they could simply remove one of the small ones, it would seem. University of Hawaii has an 0.6-metre one and a 2.2-metre one. (Yes, those are "small," all you backyard astronomers who are now drooling. ;) Take out the 0.6 and replace it with a 30-metre one, and you haven't changed the number of telescopes, right?
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?
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
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.