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Antarctic Telescope?
angkor pastes "'A novel Antarctic telescope with 16-m diameter mirrors would far outperform the Hubble Space Telescope, and could be built at a tiny fraction of its cost, says a scientist from the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, Australia.'"
"A telescope there would perform as well as a much larger one anywhere else on Earth. It's nearly as good as being in space", said Dr. Will Saunders of the Anglo-Australian Observatory.
:)
Nearly as good, nearly. I am still a huge fan of Hubble... so forgive me.
As someone who survives on research money for a living, I am sad to see what direction funding is going. Previously, those who had tbe best ideas would get the money.
Now, he who gets the press, gets the money.
This whole article is basically a press release by this guy. I'll summarize the article for you...
"Give me money because I _think_ I can build some cool stuff."
MAYBE it would outperform an orbital telescope... but th available sky to look at would be pretty limited, no? Being based in Antartic and all... I doubt too it would be easy to maintain in the winter, where there is NO light for 6 months, at minus 60 something Celcius...
And comparing a 16m telescope to a 2.4m one is not exactly comparing apples to apples either...
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I would presume that it is far warmer in Antarctica than in orbit... Anywhere on Earth is far more accessible and easier to get to than anywhere not on it.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Those of us who got it probably let out a chuckle. Those that got it and read the replies to it let out a sad chuckle.
Not only are you limited to the southern sky, but you can't use it for months at a time (during the S. hemisphere summer). Compare that to Hubble which gets a look at the entire sky as it orbits the earth, and can operate 24/7.
You cynicism is unfounded, since there are other telescopes already in Antarctica. Some like AMANDA cost far more money.
While it is highly likely that a new space telescope would give results superior to this proposed telescope the real question is "at what cost?" Like it or not, science always has been and always will be (at least for the forseeable future) limited by the cost of the project.
A new space telescope would be awesome to have, but if we can build something almost as good for say a quarter of the cost (probably less then that), and where the maintenance (even crossing the harsh tundra etc) is cheap in comparison to launching another space mission to fix one. But the real question comes here; is the difference in quality of a new ground based antarctica telescope vs a new orbital one worth a couple billion dollars?
Sure many astronomers would argue it is, but I'm sure scientists working at more immediately useful projects would argue that the money would be better spent on their projects. It all comes down to the almighty buck. Spend an extra couple billion dollars on a new telescope or hire a small army of ~50,000 grad students (assuming 2 billion dollar surplus with a grad student costing ~$40,000 a year after tuition and stipend and beaurocratic waste) to do research in other fields.
As I'm a computer engineering grad student, I can tell you where my vote lies.
Phil
Go and have a look at some of the images Hubble has become famous for. An instrument in space simply doesn't deal with any atmospheric interference. It doesn't compensate for it - its just not there. You could not capture images such as the Hubble deep fields using an antarctic telescope. Though you could get close I doubt you'd get anything as good as the Eagle Nebula starforming images we've all seen.
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This time it isn't the /. editors at fault, though, but the spaceflight now editors.
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They can point the telescope at polar bears once in a while, if that would be OK.
I'm surprised that you care so much about Antarctica. I'm all for responsibly maintaining the Earth, but I can't find a good reason to object to building one measley telescope. Especially if it will have such a great impact on astronomy.
Do you object solely on the principle that it was decreed to be a nature preserve, or is there a deeper conviction? Do you believe that a telescope would have a negative effect on the Antarctic environment?
You are missing something. The Antarctic treaty encourages scientific research activities in Antarctica. There is not a single word in that treaty that even momentarily suggests that it would be an awful thing if the research was not expressly about Antarctica itself.
The later Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, established in 1991, goes into more detail about Antarctica's status as a nature preserve, "dedicated to peace and science." It specifically bans mining and similar activities, and makes clear that all activities in Antarctica must be compatible with scientific research and environmental research in particular.
But it definitely does not ban non-scientific activities, like tourism, as long as their environmental impact is addresses correctly. And it certainly doesn't ban astronomy (an awful, polluting activity, astronomy! Shudder!).
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Transistors were probably developed with more commercial support than not (it's tough to do the accounting). It did benefit from the prior (academic) discovery/invention of quantum mechanics, but it's possible it would have been transistors could have been discovered anyway. I've known at least one person who argued that you could invent the transistor without quantum mechanics, though it certainly helps. Much (most?) of the subsequent development was driven by the very commercial interests of Bell Labs and TI. Bell Labs was very enlightened, and despite its commercial interests published a great deal of research, and supported a great deal that had no apparent commercial value (discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background).
Solid state physics continues to be motivated in many areas by commercial interests, but many of them recognize the value in publishing the basic research that leads to the development of useful devices, even if they prefer to keep the details of the devices (i.e. the engineering) themselves secret. Once the cat is out of the bag that something is possible, however, lots of other people will figure out how to do it themselves (either the same way or some other way).
I agree the people are getting pretty nuts about IP (applying for patents on things that are obvious or even already existed, and a lot of software IP is especially silly) but science and commerce have coexisted pretty well for quite a long time (astronomy was supported by the need for accurate navigation), and public funding of science is in part a bet that a reasonable fraction of the discoveries will turn out to be economically valuable. The hard part is that you can't know in advance where that will happen, so we pool our money and get the government to support the stuff that has no apparent immediate economic value (plus it's just cool to know new things).
Personally I think we should provide more support than we do to things that have little apparent economic value, but having worked both sides of the funding street, it's hard to say that commerce doesn't (or shouldn't) play a role.