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Planetary Resources To Build Crowdfunded Public Space Telescope
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."
> 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?
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!
... would welcome us as new galactic overlords.
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.
... 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.
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.
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
... 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.
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?
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.
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).
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.