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NASA Considers Sending Telescope To the Outer Solar System
Nancy_A writes "A mission that astronomers and cosmologists have only dreamed about — until now. A team at JPL and Caltech has been looking into the possibility of hitching an optical telescope to a survey spacecraft on a mission to the outer solar system. Light pollution in our inner solar system, from both the nearby glow of the Sun and the hazy zodiacal glow from dust ground up in the asteroid belt, has long stymied cosmologists looking for a clearer take on the early Universe."
Why couldn't they just send one upwards out of the plane of the solar system? Wouldn't that be quicker?
Considering that the James Webb Space Telescope has been buried, I don't like their chances.
There will already be stuff 10x better here. Just because one war is over doesn't mean it's time to start spending like fools again.
Why couldn't they just send one upwards out of the plane of the solar system? Wouldn't that be quicker?
Costs. And time.
We already have a certain velocity in the plane (earth is going around the sun, and we have to escape the sun's gravity well). We have practically zero velocity in the upwards direction. This is also who rockets are launched from near the equator.
Add to that possible slingshots around other planets, and you have your whole answer.
There is likely a bandwidth problem. Near-earth objects like Hubble and others can send us high-speed data streams. But while a distant telescope might see more, we would probably not be able to receive anywhere near the same data rate as for a closer object.
So... super-high resolution images at maybe one per day?
Maybe I have that wrong, but I don't think so. Higher-frequency (and therefore higher bandwidth) signals tend to attenuate more rapidly than lower-frequency signals do.
it will take about 30 years for this telescope to reach the outer solar system, i rest my case
There just happens to be a very interesting planet off plane that would be well worth visiting.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
I'm looking forward for the solution to time drift and delay for transmission!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Maybe NASA should consider USA's budget deficit.
no really, why don't they simply fit the thing with a small set of removable hard disks (or whatever storage technology is used these days on identified flying objects) and then just transmit low-res data over the longer link and send one disk back every three months with the high(er)-res one?
simples!
You have managed to come up with a topic for which there is no article in Wikipedia . I am duly impressed.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
...far side of Pluto? There was a drama-docu sci-fi thing made by the BBC ("Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets" I think it was called) where part of the Grand Manned Tour was to install an optical array on Pluto. Shockingly good idea, I wonder why this hasn't been done yet (apart from the obvious being cost and how to remotely soft land not just one but a series of probes carrying precision optical instruments on a rock six billion miles away *and* get them synchronised *and* hope that the journey hasn't shaken the mirrors to bits)...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I mean, if you really want to rock some low light pollution just send it out of the galaxy.
Of course it'll take a few thousand years to get the data back from each picture, but what's a thousand years when you're looking at the beginning of the universe right?
I have an ex-wife I'd like to nominate to drive it.
Just tell her there's a Nordstrom's out there.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That we blow more money on a pointless war and other bullshit like bailing out the rich and the banks than doing real science and things that benefit all of mankind.
IF we were able to put a hubble telescope out around mars or even further out where it's a lot colder, we could really take advantage of things.
Instead we blow more than the entire NASA budge air conditioning tents for a war in a god forsaken land that will end up with another dictator within 10 years anyways.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I hate our Sun.... damn polluter.
http://www.beatsdredrecoo.com/
News flash: NASA will announce something new (presumably more results) from the Kepler planet hunting spacecraft today.
Back to my post: if you can get it to about (I think) 500 AU, it gets to the focal point of the Sun's gravitational lens. The Sun then becomes a GIANT (as in millions of kilometers across) lens, allowing you to see at unbelievable resolutions even at distances of light years. I read somewhere it was at meters(?!) per light year, I can't believe that is true but even at KILOmeters per light year it would be incredible.
Targeted at the right stars it would answer, definitively once and for all if there is life around other stars. (That's if it returns a positive of course).
Of course this would require a whole host of expensive technologies. Gravity assist alone wouldn't be enough to get it out there within a single lifetime so something like ion-drives would be needed. Maybe a solar sail could be used on the outward bound leg but since it would have to SLOW DOWN and STOP you'd still need an ion-drive or something (magnetic sail?). The power requirements for the drive would dwarf that of the requirements of the Voyager probes for example so maybe a real nuclear reactor would be required. Finally some much more powerful communications sub-system would be required to fully take advantage of such an amazing probe; maybe lasers or "relay" spacecraft.
But hey, for only a couple billion dollars we can do some amazing things!
Rather than let the crowning achievement of orbital optics burn up in the atmosphere, why not boost its orbit out of earth's neighborhood. Kick it up to a LaGrange point, or even further. Even if it floats in space until it runs out of batteries, it's still better than ending up as a ball of flaming metal in the upper atmosphere. And next century when spaceflight is commoditized, someone can salvage it and bring it back for a museum piece.
The Mars rovers have shown that useful science can be done far beyond the expected lifespan of the equipment if given a chance.
--Joe
If you read the article, it's clear that this is intended to be an instrument which includes a very wide-field imager (3cm aperture) and a somewhat higher-spatial resolution (although that's only in a relative sense) channel with a 15cm aperture, both to operate in the optical/near-infrared. This is not about high spatial resolution imaging of the HST/JWST kind.
The aim is to detect the very faint extragalactic background light (EBL), which includes a component due to the integrated light from the first generation of galaxies in the Universe. Since the zodiacal light of the solar system drowns out that light, getting out beyond 5AU and thus beyond most of the asteroids which yield the dust which in turn reflect sunlight / emit their own IR flux, makes your telescope much more sensitive.
I would have said that this is just YAJS or Yet Another JPL Study, of which we've had several appear in these pages of late. If you want studies, I can give you loads of them: doesn't mean they're going to happen. And yet this one involves Chas Beichman and he knows what he's up to. It also very deliberately name checks the ESA JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) mission as a possible carrier for the proposed instrument package. OK, JUICE is also just a study at the moment, but within six months time, there's a 1-in-3 chance that it'll win the competition to be ESA's next L-class mission and thus much more "real".
Then again, given that JUICE's destination is the Jupiter system (duh), an EBL experiment would be limited to the cruise stage part en-route to 5AU.
Either way, a title of "NASA Considers Sending Telescope to the Outer Solar System" is pretty misleading: this is a study for an instrument package with a couple of cameras, photometers, and spectrometers which might hitchhike on another satellite; it scarcely qualifies as a "telescope" in the same sense as HST, Spitzer, Herschel, JWST, etc.
Kepler turned out to be a roaring success with 2000 planet candidates so far and potential for 10,000 if the tea-party doesnt terminate it. You'd think that that two follow-ups to Kepler like the inferometric planet finder would be a sure bet. But both of these were shelved last year.
Ditto the Hubble telescope. It had a rocky start with the Challenger accident and mis-ground lens. But with a lot of jury-rigging t has been more successful, and costly, than most had anticipated. But its successor the Webb telescope is already triple budget and five years delayed. It came within a hairbreadth of being cancelled twice this year.
Each disk would have to have a rocket motor to propel it Earthwards. Each would have to have a navigation system to make sure that it is heading Earthward. Each would also have to have a significant heat shield, because dropping in from Low Earth Orbit is peanuts compared to dropping in from the outer edge of the solar system. Finally, each would have to have a parachute system, beacon, etc. so that it can be found. That's significant mass, all of which needs to be boosted offworld. It is amazingly not simples.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
we could have easily landed on the moon with Apollo 1, no testing, just go.
Although development of the LEM wasn't ready until Apollo 5 (22 January 1968). The LEM was on the critical path for the Apollo program.
I think it is good idea.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
How do you service it if the mirror isn't perfect or the computers need to be changed out?