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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.'"
Even though the Hubble Space Telescope was expensive initially, you must admit that it has been cheap and easy to repair. This new telescope would be located all the way down in Antarctica. Has anyone priced flights to Antarctica lately? When there's a problem, it's not like you could just hop on the next Space Shuttle and slap another lens in. And plus it's COLD down there! It'd probably need some kind of heater or something. Think of the electric bills!
It's ridiculous how these "scientists" really don't think these things through. I expect more from people with fancy "college degrees" and smartypants names like "Will."
"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."
that's neato, we can even get it powered by penguins! in more ways than one!
Would this telescope be as beneficial as the Hubble considering the Hubble isn't attached to any surface and can freely move in space... This Antartic version would have limited viewing capabilities, so which would you rather have?
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It really is as good as being in space!
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Cue The Sun...
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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The new telescope would be utilizing the technology of today as opposed to over 10 years ago. Now I think its safe to say that deep space observational technology doesn't grow at the pace of say microchips, but I don't think its much of a suprise that new terrestrial based technology can outperform hubble. I think the real question we should be asking is: antarctic telescope vs NEW orbital telescope. Also, why haven't scientists thought of going to the poles earlier ?
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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.
The scientist is even quoted as saying so ... FTFA:
"... It's nearly as good as being in space."
Nearly as good, perhaps, but while you may have minimized light pollution by using the Antartic you still have the atmosphere diffusing incoming light. It's like a being a photojournalist with a sheet of fine tissue paper over your lens.
Built it on top of K2 or some other super-high peak if you want to keep it on earth, and only image things that are relatively perpindicular to minimize atmospheric distortion.
It was meant for doing Infrared astronomy, using an experimental IR sensor. (some pics on that link)
The thought was that due to the fact that it's so dry an cold down there, you could do IR astronomy similarly to an IR telescope in space. Results were pretty good too.
All observations were done over the Antarctic Winter, while the airport was colosed, since the sky was colder and there was less water vapor in the sky... and as you know, the less water vapor, the better the IR imaging capability, and the colder, the less background noise.
This function will be taken up by the new SOFIA platform, which we're also working on as well right now. I believe there have been /. articles about it, but in case you forgot, it's a 2.5m telescope in the back of a modified 747... also meant for IR astronomy.(at 40,000 feet up, you're above most of the water vapor in the air) SOFIA can be reconfigured after each landing.
What about taking a picture of something in the northern sky? The Hubble can swing around and take a picture of nearly everything, at least "AFAI can reason", but one mounted at the South Pole would only be able to take a picture of the southern sky. I mean, plenty of stuff going on down there, but seems like most of the research has been in the north.
(Which has it's ups and downs... more likely to discover something new, but can't follow up observations made up north.)
Umm, actually I think Mars is quite happy with the prospect of not having us.
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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Another limitation of Hubble is that it only provides images in the visible range
Err... bollocks. Hubble includes at least IR and UV instruments, and I believe further instruments designed to operate at a wide variety of wavelengths.
This time it isn't the /. editors at fault, though, but the spaceflight now editors.
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Perhaps in theory a big telescope in Antartica is a good idea, but I've read some stories over the years that they get a fair amount of snow yearly that would maybe interfere with an exposed, outdoor telescope.
It's not just that newer terrestrial technology can beat older orbital technology. It's that any time you update terrestrial technology, you can go update the thing, whereas the Hubble and its successors only get a major refresh every decade or so. So maybe a new Hubble replacement could be better than a new Antarctic telescope, but five years from now, the ground-based system will have 10 times as much computer horsepower just from normal Moore's law effects, plus it'll be able to take advantage of new optical developments, and if you need to replace the Antarctic scope, you can park the new one next door to the old one, taking advantage of the infrastructure you've got instead of buying all new launch vehicles. Alternatively, you can park the new one up in the Arctic, getting a different view of the sky.
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Perhaps the scientists (you know, the people who know ALL ABOUT how to get the best use from a telescope, the same people who designed it!) might just have taken that into account ?
The main constituent of atmospheric aberration is turbulence within the atmosphere. The atmosphere over the Antarctic is the thinnest in the world, it has far less turbulence because it's damn cold (heat = energy = motion of the gas), not to mention any massive heat 'spires' from human pollution.
You can use adaptive optics to characterise and therefore minimise the effects of the atmosphere - you shine a laser upwards, scatter off sodium atoms ~90km up, and use the measurements as inputs to actuators on the mirror segments approx 1000x per second. This can significantly remove the aberration if done correctly (you can use 2 adaptive systems, one natural, one artificial with a laser)
In any event, this is all old news, and there are existing telescopes using the technology. There have been arguments made before for the use of ground-based devices rather than space-based ones...
And yes, I do have an interest in astronomy, but of the radio kind rather than the optical variety - I picked all the above up from news channels...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I'm an ex-astronomer, so I'll comment on this.
...
The optical arangement is unlike any I've seen before or heard of. I don't have the expertise or the information to comment on whether it will really work. I'll just comment that making optically flat mirrors was very hard (much harder than the normal curved mirrors) last time I heard, but there might be new technology to help here.
There are basically three competing locations: space, Antarctica, somewhere else on Earth. There is an order of magnitude or more in accessibility and cost between each option.
Space:
Pro:
Access to the full range of wavelengths - no atmospheric absorption or emission. (Particularly useful in UV and IR.)
No atmospheric bluring - diffraction limited resolution at all wavelengths
Can observe almost any part of the sky at any time.
Con:
Hugely expensive
Very inaccessible - service missions are either impossible or cost hundreds of millions or more
Size limitations on launch - either the telescope is smallish (Hubble) or needs even more expense to 'unfold' in orbit (new generation space telescope).
Very hostile environment: cold on one side, hot on another, radiation belts,
Antarctica:
Pro:
Access to wavelengths difficult or impossible to access elsewhere on Earth (mostly mid to far IR. The ozone hole presumably helps out in UV also.)
Best seeing on the planet: very little atmospheric blur much of the time.
Con:
Can only ever view half the sky
Unusable during summer
Very expensive
Poor accesibility: Only during summer, only at great expense.
Hostile environment: extreme cold. Possible build up of ice by sublimation deposition.
Anywhere else:
Pro:
Cheapest
Daily access, can drive a truck up to the telescope
Can have astronomers on site, e.g. debugging new detectors
Can see the northern hemisphere
Con:
Poor seeing
Many interesting wavelengths inaccessible or hard to observe
Unusable during the day
We need all three - space for what we can't do on Earth, Antarctica for what we can't do elsewhere (except space, which costs more). Whether the telescope described (very briefly...) in the article is sensible I couldn't say, nor could I say whether it makes sense to use Dome C rather than the more accessible, and manned, south pole base.
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And the cost of building two of these things is much less than twice the cost of building a single one, because a large fraction of the cost is developing all the tools and technology to build it, and they can crank out two or three more for not much extra cost. (Obviously building the base and staffing it are duplicated costs.) By contrast, building all the launching systems for the Hubble is so expensive that you're not going to build a couple of clones and launch them, you're going to wait another decade and develop most of the system from scratch using the technology of the time again.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The site at Paranal have 4 8.5 meter telescopes and interferometry can can equate their imaging to the distance they stand apart.
Huh? Hubble rotates very fast around the earth. It probably passes through the earth's shadow every couple of hours. It is in low earth orbit - has to be since the shuttle cannot reach high orbits.
Oh well, what the hell...
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?
I can just imagine the size of the gyros and retros we will need to rotate the planet so that this Antarctic telescope can view something interesting from the northern hemisphere.
--
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life but with less money.
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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At least there is no danger of a "mistake" at the mirror grinding factory causing a "myopia" in the telescope, because I think the Pentagon knows that it can't spy on Earth from Antarctica. However, there is some danger, in having mirrors exposed like that, to crazy Swedes shooting at dogs. Hopefully, MacReady got the damn Thing.
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That several thousand feet is ice. Given the temperature, it's pretty stable. The Amundsen-Scott base is built on top of it.
Ice also doesn't cover the whole of Antarctica; if you're worried about ice you could build your telescope right on top of the permafrost. Some pictures of the "dry valleys" are here.
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Jeffrey Boulier
A couple of people have mentioned that you can't work in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum without going to space. True, and critically important to some science. Also, from Antarctica, you can only see the southern sky, not the north, so this is another limitation.
These are not good reasons not to build this proposed telescope, just ways in which Hubble is still uniquely qualified.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
"Ok, Bob, now you drew the short straw, so you'll have to go out there and clean the lens. Now here's how you do it: take this here high-tech, zero-loss, botanical fibre cleaning pad..."
... Bob, have you brushed your teeth since you last ate?"
... You're kidding, right?"
"Um... isn't that a towel?"
"Well sure, to the untrained eye! Stay focused, Bob. Now, the first thing you'll want to do is gently blow the snow off. Then
"Huh? Oh, yeah, sure."
"Floss?"
"Well... yeah."
"Gargle?"
"I don't think so... why?"
"Bob, you're going to want to gargle before you go out there, because the best cleaning solution we've been able to come up with is saliva."
"Yeah right!
"Bob, do I look like I'm a kidding kind of guy?"
"..... No."
"Bob, you'll need to gargle with something to make sure there are absolutely no food particles in your saliva. You don't want someone to mistake a piece of Fruit Loops for a new moon around Jupiter, do ya?"
"Oh, heck no!"
"Good man. So be sure to get the saliva really clean. And your tongue."
"Well, yea, sure."
"Because the next thing you're going to do after blowing the snow off is to apply the saliva with your tongue."
"So, you mean, lick the lens?"
"That's right, Bab, lick the lens."
(an hour later)
"Stan, that was just mean."
"Hey, he's a noobie! Everyone gets their tongue frozen to the lens at least once. We'll give him about 5 more minutes, then we'll go out with a cup of hot water and free him."
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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.