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Planetary Resources To Build Crowdfunded Public Space Telescope

Posted by Soulskill on from the don't-you-have-money-of-your-own dept.

kkleiner writes "Planetary Resources, the company that set its sights on mining asteroids, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1M to crowdsource the world's first publicly accessible space telescope. In an interview, co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis stated that the ARKYD 100 telescope is a means of 'extending the optic nerve of humanity.' The company hopes that the campaign, which is supported by Richard Branson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Seth Green, will make an orbiting telescope available to the public to help schools and museums in their educational efforts to inspire great enthusiasm in space."

60 comments

  1. Seth Green? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Who knew?

  2. business meeting? by HtR · · Score: 3, Funny

    > supported by Richard Branson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Seth Green

    My imagination can't comprehend what a business meetting or board meeting would be like with these three, but I bet it's awesome!

    --
    Have you tried turning it off and on again?
    1. Re:business meeting? by HtR · · Score: 4, Funny

      Actually, I do have an image in my head.

      Bill Nye is on one end of the board room table with bubbling beakers and flasks connected with plastic tubes, Seth Green is on the other end of the table building obscene clay figures of celebrities, and Richard Branson parachutes in through the skylight.

      --
      Have you tried turning it off and on again?
    2. Re:business meeting? by Loki_1929 · · Score: 0

      Not sure what Bill Nye's cooking up with those beakers and flasks, but I hope it's nothing more complex than Folgers coffee. The guy is a complete idiot when it comes to science and he shows his ass whenever he's brought in as an "expert" by the media.

      --
      -- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
    3. Re:business meeting? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A complete idiot? Yeah, right. Also he's done more to popularize science than your neck bearded, cheetos-stained, sausage-fingered lardass ever has.

    4. Re:business meeting? by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      Lessee, we've made fun of sponsors Seth Green and Bill Nye. Who's left?

      Oooh, Richard Branson! You've started successful companies with more cachet than Apple and earned billions off them. You've nailed more pussy than the average 38 year old neckbeard has downloaded in his mom's basement. La HOOOOOOOZER!!!!!

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    5. Re:business meeting? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Seth green is a PHD holding astrophysist that is also a successful actor and has his own tv show where he does hilarious things with action figures.

      they are all involved in the sciences, and also have the public presence to move stuff along. Get Neil DeGrace Tyson and you got basically the Asimov, Clarke, and Sagan of this generation.

  3. Billion by captaindomon · · Score: 1

    A million for an orbiting telescope? Wouldn't that be more like a billion?

    --
    Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
    1. Re:Billion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is a million to lobby Congress to give them 5 billion, silly.

    2. Re:Billion by robot256 · · Score: 1

      They claim to have already designed and built the thing (and have some pictures of a plausible-looking prototype). They just need your hard-earned cash to actually put it into space and build the web portal, [sarcasm]because they forgot about that part in their original budget[/sarcasm]. I feel like the kickstarter page is a publicity stunt instead of a necessary fundraising tool. It's also terribly disingenuous of them to post Hubble images and say "you can take pictures of these" (which most people read as "like these"), implying that their 15cm "main optic" flying at the lowest possible orbit will get anywhere near that amount of pointing stability or resolution.

      That said, anything that makes people think about space science, or even make them feel they have a financial stake in it is probably a good thing.

    3. Re:Billion by femtobyte · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The telescope itself isn't, in this case, a groundbreaking state-of-the-art super-expensive instrument. It's a reasonably nice 'scope by amateur astronomy standards, and the viewing from space is great --- but the main point of this project is education/outreach. For a million bucks, you can build a lot more capable telescope on earth (including a dark site location); but that might not have the awesomeness factor to eighth-graders as controlling a space telescope for their class project. If you want a space telescope with groundbreaking scientific capabilities that you can't get (at any price) from Earth, you might need $1e9 dollars; but $1e6 (plus a whole lot of free mission/design support that would get counted in the budget of a $1e9 project) seems reasonable for putting an "advanced amateur" telescope in space.

    4. Re:Billion by imsabbel · · Score: 2

      Well, I guess its more like "A digicam with tele lens and filter wheel mounted on a cubesat" then "real" telescope

      --
      HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
    5. Re:Billion by westlake · · Score: 2

      For a million bucks, you can build a lot more capable telescope on earth but that might not have the awesomeness factor to eighth-graders as controlling a space telescope for their class project.

      The direct view through an amateur's optical telescope on the ground is awesome in its own right --- intimate and affordable.

    6. Re:Billion by femtobyte · · Score: 2

      I personally agree. And, in my opinion, you could spend $1M to put together ~20 really high quality educational astronomy setups, truck them around the country, and bus students out from urban areas to proper viewing sites --- to give a lot more kids some really awesome hands-on work with a nice telescope setup. I think "getting pictures from a space telescope" would be more exciting to kids (at levels not advanced enough to appreciate much more than the "ooh, pretty" factor) than "getting pictures from a more advanced remote-operated dark-site telescope," but hands-on looking through the eyepiece of a 6" apo refractor or 12" Dobsonian would be even better (plus doing some real science with simple instrumentation attached to said scopes).

    7. Re:Billion by pavon · · Score: 2

      And to add to that, there already are a number of observatories scattered about which devote some/all of their time to educational and outreach. There aren't any space telescopes dedicated to that purpose.

    8. Re:Billion by symbolset · · Score: 1

      This is probably more about getting people engaged in the process. The designs aren't really expensive though, and microsats don't cost as much as you might think to launch. They will probably wind up selling some of the tech they develop too. I think it's pretty slick.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
  4. Public access by intermodal · · Score: 2

    I'm having difficulty figuring out exactly how much "public access" we can really get to something that is probably going to be in demand by a lot of people doing a lot more important things than my space-equivalent of a Google Street View tour of places I'm never going and know nothing about.

    --
    In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
    1. Re:Public access by femtobyte · · Score: 3

      They say "public access," not "free access" --- this'll be a pay-to-play "tourist attraction," with some time handed out free* (*paid by donations/grants, or the taxpayer as a tax write-off) for education/outreach. It'll be available "to the public" in the sense that anyone in the public can plop down a couple hundred bucks per snapshot from it (as opposed to needing to write a grant through a research institution). So you won't be getting any "Galactic Street View" time slots on this telescope unless you're willing to pay, which will limit the demand to the available supply.

    2. Re:Public access by intermodal · · Score: 1

      You're making a big assumption here, femtobyte. When did I ever say free? My real concern is, how am I to be assured that the "public" won't get priced out of the deal? Especially if grant money intrudes and artificially inflates the market rate for such time. The astronomy "public" is more than a little influenced by government and deep-pocketed corporations, after all.

      --
      In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
  5. duh! by crutchy · · Score: 1

    they'll spend a million talking about a space telescope

  6. I, for one... by KraxxxZ01 · · Score: 2

    ... would welcome us as new galactic overlords.

  7. doesn't have to be Hubble grade by schlachter · · Score: 1

    A pint sized space telescope with a 1-2 yr mission could probably be built for $1M. Maybe Brandson will launch it for free.

    --
    My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
    1. Re:doesn't have to be Hubble grade by The+Sad+Nazgul · · Score: 1

      The design is somewhat similar to the ultraviolet/optical telescope on Swift. Swift's original cost was about $70 million, but it has a gamma ray telescope and an X ray telescope in addition to its UV/optical telescope. They can probably build the spacecraft and instrument fairly cheaply if they use off the shelf components. The expensive part is going to be the launch vehicle and the continuing ground support after launch. One million dollars is not going to be enough, but a few tens of millions of dollars may be.

  8. Will go to waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In the sciences we already have facilities for anyone to access. They are called user-facilities.

    Besides this telescope is going to need way more than $1,000,000. That my buy the hardware but it won't pay for operational time.

  9. Um, excuse me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You fruitbats were supposed to mine asteroids, not send cameras into earth orbit. And as far as I know, NASA and other space agencies already publish plenty of public space pictures. Nice smoke and mirrors you liars, we all know no one will mine asteroids, you can divert attention for only so long, guys.

    1. Re:Um, excuse me by DeionXxX · · Score: 2

      ... you might be a troll but...

      They've always said step 1 was creating all of these small cameras to send into space to look for asteroids. This way they can catalog all the asteroids first and what they're made of. Then they can go get the ones they are interested in. We apparently only know of a fraction of asteroids currently in our solar system and only know what a few of them are made of.

    2. Re:Um, excuse me by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      ... you might be a troll but...

      They've always said step 1 was creating all of these small cameras to send into space to look for asteroids. This way they can catalog all the asteroids first and what they're made of. Then they can go get the ones they are interested in. We apparently only know of a fraction of asteroids currently in our solar system and only know what a few of them are made of.

      Apparently, the device they are kick-starting is a tech demo/prototype of the ones they want to hunt asteroids with. Whether you think of the offer to pay for slices of it as a 'win-win proposition' or 'why am I subsidizing your R&D again?' is up to you.

    3. Re:Um, excuse me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think we've finally found a foolproof way to reach profitability:
      1) Get other people to fund development of prototype telescope to hunt asteroids.
      2) Get other people to fund launch of prototype telescope to hunt asteroids.
      3) Get other people to fund development of several finalized asteroid hunting telescopes.
      4) Get other people to fund launch of finalized asteroid hunting telescopes.
      5) Get other people to fund identifying asteroids to mine.
      6) Get other people to fund prototype launch & mining platforms for asteroids.
      7) Get other people to fund launch of asteroid mining platforms.
      8) Get other people to fund return of valuable minerals to earth.
      9) Sell the valuable minerals on earth, keep all the money yourself.
      10) PROFIT!

    4. Re:Um, excuse me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      "extending the optic nerve of humanity"... Species-level talk is usually the domain of Space Nuttery; ie, you won't hear from asteroid mining ever again.

      "They've always said step 1 was creating all of these small cameras to send into space to look for asteroids. This way they can catalog all the asteroids first and what they're made of. "

      1) We already know where the asteroids are. Wouldn't it make sense to "mine" the biggest ones we can see from Earth first anyways?

      2) We already know what they're made of. The same damn periodic table of the elements as we have here on Earth.

    5. Re:Um, excuse me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, I'm almost positive that there are asteroids floating around out there comprised of intriguing blends of unobtainium, wonderflonium, baloneyium, adamantium, cuendillar, dilithium, jerktonium, kryptonite, melange, obsidium, philotes, midichlorians, quantium 40, saronite, tylium, valyrian steel, vespene gas, and other components of the Rearden Metal alloys.

  10. Really you need our money by depressedrobot · · Score: 1

    Look at the people who are behind planetary resources: Chris Lewicki: President & Chief Engineer, Tom Jones: Advisor, Sara Seager, Larry Page , Eric Schmidt , James Cameron, Charles Simonyi, K. Ram Shriram , Ross Perot, Jr. I have a hard time giving money to millionaires and billionaires. Also I think that they are connected to Intellectual Ventures, one of the biggest IP trolls out there. Also if it finds a sold platinum asteroid for them to mine do we all get a share? Oh right that's just for the rich people. I totally approve of the idea, but I don't like the people doing it. Also some of these people don't have the best track record with open access.

    1. Re:Really you need our money by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      Kickstarter is a slightly awkward fit for some of the uses it has been put to.

      For purely charitable purposes, having a 'the cash gets returned, not dumped into a black hole, if the project never gets off the ground' mechanism is really quite sensible. If Project X simply can't be done for less than Y dollars, it's extremely useful to have some way of asking for Y dollars; but freeing each potential contributor from the concern of 'Well, I'd give if I knew it were going somewhere; but if you raise less than Y I might as well have just given it to some bloated and dubiously efficient; but known-functional, outift..."

      And, (as much as they try to deny it, to avoid customer service happy fun time), it also works reasonably well as a store for niche toys. In exchange for loaning you the purchase price, I get a (not perfect; but so far reasonably decent) shot at getting whatever toy I want that nobody could necessarily get a bank or a VC to look twice at. Ok, fair enough.

      Things start to get increasingly awkward as you move toward overtly commercial products asking for more money (or longer time to delivery) than is justified as a purchase price. They have no method(I assume that this is because they don't want to become a stock exchange), for a kick-started entity to offer anything that isn't a more or less fixed-value item(and, since the payoff is uncertain, realistic kickstart projects can only offer you something of fixed value on the low end of the possible payoffs).

    2. Re:Really you need our money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Delusional mental health problems can also occur among the rich, just look at Howard Hughes. You'll never hear from asteroid mining again.

  11. Out of curiosity... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

    How much of a penalty, relative to the penalties incurred for things like small size, subpar optics, etc. does putting up with the atmosphere impose? (I understand that for certain wavelengths it's basically 100%, but this isn't an extreme UV instrument or anything).

    I'm told, by people more closely involved with amateur astronomy than I, that a 200mm aperture is a pretty small instrument, especially for reflector-based designs. How well would you expect it to perform compared to, say, a ~$10,000 device in some reasonably-non-light-polluted rural area(nothing heroic; but not necessarily within spitting distance of a major population center). A $50k? $100k?

    Obviously, 'in space' is sort of its own reward; but(because space telescopes have historically been built only when somebody with relatively deep pockets wants to attack a problem that they can't build a ground telescope for), I really don't have a sense of how much advantage 'in space' gets you compared to a much less design constrained piece of hardware that has to look through the atmosphere; but also didn't have to be launched into space.

    1. Re:Out of curiosity... by femtobyte · · Score: 1

      Since the popularization of adaptive optics, the atmosphere has become much less of a problem. Before adaptive optics, you were strongly limited in how big a telescope would be useful for resolving power --- even on a perfectly clear night, atmospheric fluctuations would cause different parts of your big telescope aperture to see different areas of the sky, destroying any resolution advantage over smaller scopes (though you at least still got more light for a brighter blurry picture). But now, with adaptive optics, you can make your earth-based telescope as big as you want (or can afford). This project is not a good deal for raw telescope performance --- for $1M, you could get a *much* better terrestrial telescope, remotely located in an optimal dark site (or a few sites around the world). The $1M cost of this one is for the outreach/publicity impact of being in space, not the raw data-taking capability.

      Space telescopes are still useful for imaging outside the visible spectrum, in ranges that are blocked or washed out by the atmosphere. You can't get the Spitzer space telescope's deep-IR capabilities from earth-bound devices. And, a whole lot of the useful scientific information for astronomy is outside the visible band. Space telescopes also have no background from scattered atmospheric light, so you can see far dimmer objects that would be washed-out by background on even the darkest earth viewing; but taking advantage of this requires a considerably bigger/better telescope and sensor package than this low-budget project.

      $10k is a bit low for a top-notch 8"+ amateur refractor, but a $50k budget (and serious amateur astronomy setups do get up into this range) should get you a setup that will be more capable than this telescope *on a good seeing night at a dark sky location*.

    2. Re:Out of curiosity... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Adaptive optics are good for resolution, but don't help with photometric precision. Getting above the atmosphere does absolutely help with that. See Kepler and MOST for good examples of this.

    3. Re:Out of curiosity... by The+Sad+Nazgul · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ultraviolet light with wavelengths blueward of about 300 nanometers does not get through the atmosphere. If we want to see it, we have to go to space. And the ultraviolet is where some of the most exciting astronomy is happening right now.

    4. Re:Out of curiosity... by symbolset · · Score: 1

      They're looking for asteroids, likely best seen in the infrared.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
    5. Re:Out of curiosity... by Solandri · · Score: 1

      How much of a penalty, relative to the penalties incurred for things like small size, subpar optics, etc. does putting up with the atmosphere impose?

      Here's Saturn as seen by ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile (8.2m mirror, though it can combine 4 of them into an interferometer). The observatory is at 2635m above sea level, so is looking through about 70% of the air you'd be seeing through at sea level (air decreases in density with altitude, so there is diminishing returns for getting up high). The observatory's location was chosen for its perennial clear skies. The photo was taken with what was state of the art adaptive optics a decade ago (2002). I wasn't able to find a more recent photo of Saturn from a large, ground-based telescope in 15 minutes of googling.

      Here's Saturn as seen by Hubble (2.4m mirror). Not much of a contest.

      I picked Saturn as an example instead of Jupiter because Jupiter is bigger and closer than Saturn. So even at low resolution you can still get some impressive shots. Here's one taken by an 11" (28cm) telescope.

      I'm told, by people more closely involved with amateur astronomy than I, that a 200mm aperture is a pretty small instrument, especially for reflector-based designs.

      200mm (about 8 inches) is about the size of your basic cheap but serious reflector for an amateur astronomer. It's pretty much the minimum you'd expect anyone doing astronomy as a serious hobby would own.

      A quick calc of the Rayleigh criterion says a 200mm scope would have a maximum angular resolution of 0.6 arc-seconds (i.e. two stars closer than this separation would appear as a single dot). Hubble's Rayleigh criterion limit is 0.05 arc-seconds, so Hubble can resolve objects 12x smaller. The Hubble photo is 2150x1000 resolution. Reduce it by 12x to about 180x83 resolution, and that's about the amount of detail in you'd expect in a Saturn pic from a 200mm scope in orbit. IMHO it's not really worth it in the visible band. They'd better be planning to do a lot of UV work with it.

    6. Re:Out of curiosity... by mrsquid0 · · Score: 1

      Their camera works from the near ultraviolet to the near infrared. One reason for using the ultraviolet is that at some point Planetary Resources is going to want to take spectra of sunlight that reflects off an asteroid in order to get detailed information about the composition of the asteroid. Having access to the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum will be a big help for this. I am impressed with what I have seen of the ARKYD telescopes. Assuming that the specs on their Web site are correct (and why wouldn't they be?) Planetary Resources is building instruments that will be quite capable of doing remote prospecting, and of doing some decent astrophysical observations as well.

      --
      Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
    7. Re:Out of curiosity... by ah.clem · · Score: 1

      OK, so the fact that I can get a pretty good image of Saturn and a couple of it's moons with my 130mm parabolic short tube from my driveway in a light-soaked neighborhood in a washed out sky means I should actually be pretty damn happy. I'd like to step up to a 10" - 12" OTA but the GEM is stupidly expensive and I have little love for a Dob (imaging is my goal but man, what a budget you have to have...)

      Thanks for the pics.

      --
      "Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
  12. which I believe was some sort of hovercraft... by Thud457 · · Score: 1

    I'm sure there must have been some discussion of sharks and lasers...

    --

    the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

    1. Re:which I believe was some sort of hovercraft... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ....full of eels?

  13. Pocket Change by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

    Couldn't Branson just kick in the $1M out of pocket change?

    1. Re:Pocket Change by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      Couldn't Branson just kick in the $1M out of pocket change?

      I'm pretty sure that you don't get to the position where you can do that by doing that if you could get somebody else to do it instead...

  14. like shooting sharks in a barrel. with a laser. by Thud457 · · Score: 2
    no, no, no, NO, NO...
    Here, you've got to say it this way:

    one miiiiiiiilllllliiiiooooonnn dollars!

    --

    the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  15. Newfangled Tangulated Cotton-picking... by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    Anybody else read that as "confounded" telescope?

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  16. Then again by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 1

    I remember a previous plan "to help schools and museums in their educational efforts to inspire great enthusiasm in space". We put Alan B. Shepard in a Mercury capsule, shot him into the sky and put it on the cover of Life Magazine. Worked for a whole generation.

  17. A similar kickstarter telescope project: by jbeaupre · · Score: 1

    Ok, it's not in space, and it's not actually kickstarter. But pretty cool none the less.

    http://www.cincinnatiobservatory.org/history.html

    --
    The world is made by those who show up for the job.
  18. How is this different than what we have now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You can get telescope time virtually anywhere already (including PR/educational time) assuming you are not a crackpot and willing to jump thru some bueracratic hoops to submit a resonable technical justification for why you want it and what you hope to accomplish with it.

    What difference will a 'public' telescope make? Will it spend its time looking at exciting things rather than the boring things non-public telescopes spend their time presumably looking at? More telescopes are a win for all however from TFA it looks like money is the objective function for telescope time which to me seems sad and wasteful.

    1. Re:How is this different than what we have now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What difference will a 'public' telescope make?

      It will eventually make money for private investors, at $25/pop tourist shots plus tax writeoffs for donations plus educational grants plus selling education "packages". This is a publicity stunt to combine raising public awareness/excitement about space missions with public awareness/excitement about giving public money to private, for-profit space entrepreneurs.

      While I like the idea of getting kids excited about space physics, I'm personally wary that the push for privatization will lead to much more "sad and wasteful" moneygrubbing than real long-term scientific benefit. These excited young kids will grow up to a world with far reduced opportunity to actually become real astronomy researchers; just carnies in a shallow profiteering carnival of astro-hucksterism.

    2. Re:How is this different than what we have now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Better then no spending. Or bureaucratic bullshit. If people can get rich exploring space while ripping off the masses thats better than no one doing it. No doubt a good government program with good oversight could get space exploration done cheaply and efficiently. But we will never have that. Not until we have a revolution and get rid of all the bullshit military industrial complex spending and promote the discoveries that the powerful don't fucking want. So I will settle for space exploitation.

      NASA does (did) great things. But they are limited. No one looks over their shoulder. And they are in bed with the DoD and people unwilling to resell anything they develop. But than the public will never have access to the body of GRAIL mission data. So fuck them.

      Private enterprise is only limited by empire building ability in this country. If you pay off the right people you can do anything you want. We need this for space exploration. Not this crap we have now.

      We got velcro out of it at least.

  19. This is great. by flayzernax · · Score: 1

    This is a good start towards something new. I been thinking of something like this for a mars rover.

    All I see is people complaining why can't the reach people do it themselves.

    Well my response to that is, maybe they want to stay rich. Because if your not rich in this country you are a godamn slave.

    But that does not lessen the fact that this is the right step towards doing off planet exploration without the government muddling things up. Opening it up to everyone not just the elite top graduates of select universities and pedigrees.

    I wish them luck.

  20. public control ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    means it spends half it time pointed at topless beaches, just like any other publicly controlled web cam.

  21. Why call it crowdfunded? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It obviously means Timeshare. Good luck trying to get access to the telescope when there are thousands, if not more, people funding the development of it and wanting to do the same.

  22. they crowdfund for themselves mainly by Herve5 · · Score: 1

    The company at the origin of this tries to leverage crowdfunding (in exchange for some observation time through a 'scope we all agree will be pathetic compared to the same amount spent on ground) because they need many such small 'telescope-sats' to perform their primary goal: detecting asteroids.
    There are various ways to perform this from space, but all revolves around having *many* observing microsatellites, the many viewpoints needed to reconstitute asteroid trajectories.
    And, for now, they only have *a single one* in development.

    So, you geeks crowdfunding the second one are in fact helping them to setup an actual asteroid-detecting network.
    At least, it's an original way of doing...

    --
    Herve S.