Slashdot Mirror
The Herschel Telescope Close To Blast Off
pha7boy writes "The Herschel space observatory, the European Space Agency's answer to the Hubble Telescope, is about to be sent into orbit. With a mirror 1.5 times the size of the Hubble mirror, the Herschel will look at the universe in the infrared and sub-millimeter range. This 'will permit Herschel to see past the dust that scatters Hubble's visible wavelengths, and to gaze at really cold places and objects in the Universe — from the birthing clouds of new stars to the icy comets that live far out in the Solar System.'"
till they first post the images from this baby.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
are we putting money on if they learned from the hubble mistakes?
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
This instrument is capable of great science, but spatial resolving power is not it's strong suit. Since it is measuring at wavelenghts much greater than hubble (100-1000x), the 3.5 meter mirror doesn't give you anything like hubble.
As for all the new discoverys i'm sure these new telescopes will find, i'm curious if they will do the same thing with these as they did with the hubble, by pointing it at a "black" region of space and leaving it there for a while gathering exposures, only to discover that the region wasn't "black" at all, it was completely filled with all sorts of different galaxies, and this was only a small point in space they were looking.
Here is the link for the Hubble info in case you're intrested.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1996/01/text/
If it's in infrared, then it's NOT a Hubble replacement, it's a Spitzer replacement.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
A telescope with a bigger mirror can concentrate more light, therefore it sees fainter, more distant, objects. And the further away things are in the universe, the more red-shifted their light is. It really makes sense a space telescope being designed for infrared light, rather than visible.
Redshift, probably.
When you're looking at things really really far away, the frequencies shift towards the red end of the spectrum due to the doppler effect of the Hubble Expansion. If we only looked in the visible spectrum, we wouldn't see anything, because the light had already shifted out of the proper range. Thus, but looking towards the infrared and longer wavelengths, we can actually detect things that originally light emitted in the visible spectrum but are reaching us in a heavily stretched state.
I wasn't exactly sure myself until this comment and this wiki entry. If we focused them on visible spectrums, we'd not notice the most distant emissions. Since attempting to detect obejects that are extremely distant is the apparently the whole bit with the Herschel telescope it starts to make sense.
Ice Cream has no bones.
I'm only an amateur astronomer but... With adaptive optics we can get better visible light images with ground based telescopes like Keck than with any orbiting telecope that could be launched any time soon. However, infrared is blocked by the atmosphere so an observatory without an atmosphere is required.
Yup. I don't know that I'd even call myself an amatuer astronomer but I remember being fascinated by a Nova episode about IRAS ages ago.
This is a very poorly explored region of the spectrum, hence the interest. I think the issue with sending up another Hubble is that it just isn't as much bang for buck.
Don't get me wrong - it seems silly not to have ONE visual spectrum space telescope, but looking into different wavelengths is far more likely to turn up revolutionary results and advance the field.
Here's an analogy. We discover a planet on a distant star. Which is more likely to turn up new results - a detailed observation of that distant planet, or a careful high-resolution analysis of craters on the Earth's moon? Sure, the latter might be good science, and turn up results, but it just isn't going to be as likely to change how we think about everything.
Because visible light is scattered by dust a lot more that IR. So if you want to look inside a protoplanetary disc, visible light is not of much use.
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
It's because it makes sense to use space telescopes to look at radiation that can't be observed with ground based telescopes, because the Earth's atmosphere absorbs all of it. Herschel with its three instruments (HIFI, PACS and SPIRE) operates in the submm and far infrared, a part of the spectrum inaccessible from ground, and will spend a lot of observing time e.g. to look at interstellar water, a molecule believed to play an important role for the cooling of star forming clouds.
"Hope it doesn't surrender when Hubble passes it by :)"
Nope. The German bits will strike across the short distance between them, roll a two-pronged tank advance around the Hubble, and incorporate it into their glorious thousand-year astronomical plan....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not to be outdone by Europe, the US plan to launch the next generation follow-up to the Hubble Telescope!
That would be the James Webb Space Telescope, and it's been in the works for quite a while.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Get really expensive, not much better images?
Adaptive optics help cancel out the distortions produced by the atmosphere. That's not particularly useful on a space telescope.
Once you've got adaptive optics to take away most of the biggest advantages for space telescopes, the ease of building giant mirrors on the ground takes over and you get much better performance for your budget.
Depends on what your goal is. However, you are correct in this matter.
Yes, AO is generally a specific application of a telescopic array designed to thwart distortions caused by an atmosphere. I should have been a bit more clear on this. In this case, I was mixing up AO with a composite mirror/detector telescope.
However, imagine an array much larger than we could build on the ground. For instance, multiple telescopes in orbit around the moon, earth, and the sun? You could use that for all sorts of interesting research (is there an application for multiple parallaxes?), but you could get a hell of a lot of resolution with an array the size of 2AU diameter (for instance, multiple telescopes in an earthlike orbit.)
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
April 16 Ariane 5 Herschel & Planck
Launch time: approx. 1230 GMT (8:30 a.m. EDT)
Launch site: ELA-3, Kourou, French Guiana
Arianespace Flight 188 will use an Ariane 5 rocket with an ECA upper stage to launch the European Space Agency's Herschel and Planck observatories. The Herschel infrared telescope will study the evolution of stars and galaxies and the Planck spacecraft will observe the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. [Jan. 14]
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/tracking/index.html
This is same idea, but a much larger mirror, as the Spitzer Space Telescope:
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/about/index.shtml
The ESA, NASA and JPL have collaborated on this project since this appears to scaled up version of Spitzer Space Telescope with 6 years of advanced technology and lesson learned from Spitzer Space Telescope.
Good luck ESA with sending Herschel and Planck in space.
True. But the oldest galaxies (what Herschel is mainly designed to look at) don't emit in the visible, even in their own (rest) frame. That's because the earliest galaxies are very dusty, and all this dust is opaque to the visible light. The stars are still there, glowing away, but their light is absorbed by this dust. This absorption heats the dust, warming it to 35K (give or take), which, as all things with non-zero temperature do, emits radiation like a blackbody. This light is then redshifted such that it's blackbody spectrum peaks in the submillimeter, which is what Herschel looks at.
Disclaimer: I work on BLAST, a balloon-borne experiment (cheaper than a satellite) which has detectors nearly identical to the ones of the SPIRE (main) instrument on Herschel.
--Xandu
With a mirror 1.5 times the size of the Hubble mirror....
No, it's 2.3 times the size.
It's 1.5 times the diameter of the Hubble mirror. That equals 2.3 times the size.
Some days, you just gotta wonder about the /. editors' intelligence....
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll