Massive Construction Effort Begins For World's Largest Telescope

An anonymous reader writes with this selection from a press release issued by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "Astronomers have begun to blast 3 million cubic feet of rock from a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes to make room for what will be the world's largest telescope when completed near the end of the decade. The telescope will be located at the Carnegie Institution's Las Campanas Observatory-one of the world's premier astronomical sites, known for its pristine conditions and clear, dark skies. Over the next few months, more than 70 controlled blasts will break up the rock while leaving a solid bedrock foundation for the telescope and its precision scientific instruments."

Comments

Ground vs Space

[zAPPzAPP]

It seems whenever I read an article about something new and great discovered by a telescope, it mentions one of the orbiting sattelite type telescopes.

I can't remember when I last heard from a ground based one, except for routine things as continuously sweeping certain areas of the sky for anomalies, like a space surveillance camera.

Now I don't follow astronomy closely, so my viewpoint is based on what of it gets through to general science news sites.
But are huge investments in ground based telescopes like this still worth it compared to the alternative?

Re:Ground vs Space

[mrsquid0]

This is largely an illusion. Most space-based telescopes are run either by NASA or ESA, and both of those organizations have very large public relations offices. These offices issue a lot of press releases and put a lot of effort into getting results from their satellites into the media. The Space Telescope Science Institute was one of the pioneers of this approach to popularizing astronomy, and they were very successful at it. Ground-based observatories tend not to have big public outreach budgets, and usually do not have large numbers of people dedicated to getting their results into the media, so we do not see their results on the front pages of the New York Times or the Economist as often.

Space- and ground-based observatories generally do very different things and complement each other instead of compete with each other. For example, I have used ground-based observatories to take spectra of very faint sources and combined them with X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical observations from Swift and Hubble. The science that comes out of these observations would be impossible without observatories both on the ground and in orbit.

Re:It'll be the largest optical telescope, IF...

[WrongSizeGlass]

Even if it never holds the title for the "World's Largest Telescope", a 28-foot diameter primary mirror is a very big telescope ... and it will continue to work after even larger telescopes are built.

Re:It'll be the largest optical telescope, IF...

[Anonymous Coward]

And these telescopes will be dwarved by future ones. One hundred years from now, we'll probably having giant space telescopes working as a single interferometer with extremely long baselines orbiting the sun beyond jupiter orbit capable of imaging extraterrestial planets.