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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?
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.
The reign of a great empire has come to an end. I think we'll dive into a quasi modern dark ages for the next period. With the collapse of the world economy wars will break out even more one even might consider WW3. The U.S.A. became unimaginable rich and prosperous with cheap borrowed energy (fossil fuel) and later borrowed money. With this they could achieve things which were awesome and great. Alas with great effort too they destroyed the pillars of their own success and the U.S.A has now become a hollow shell of what they've once been. The world has to stabilize again first before we're going to see great and whole hearty efforts in space again. And with powers shifting don't be surprised if some country else will take the lead. At least IMHO.
JWST is actually now funded. The money wound up coming out of agriculture for some reason. Given how long JWST has been on the drawing board they'll want to start considering future space telescopes now if they want them to be in operation in three decades.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Well then it's a good thing they're only hoping to go as far as Jupiter, where "the zodiacal light is 30 times fainter than at Earth". But don't take my word for it, try reading the article.
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
I'll take the piss out then. The target of this scope isn't supernovas, or anything that requires quick reaction time. It is meant to observe the pervasive background radiation from the early universe.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Xena was just a temporary suggestion for the name; since 13th September 2006 it's actually been called Eris.
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.
Why is this tagged as funny?
Sounds fairly plausible and bleak to me.
But don't take my word for it, try reading the article.
Heretic!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.