Well, I for one find the units we use in astronomy to be uncommonly bizarre. A parsec is just an idiotic unit. Light years are way better. They actually tell you something useful...
I must respectfully disagree quite strongly! It's parsecs that tell you something useful, not light years - and the trick is combining them with arcseconds, the other unit you unfairly malign. If something is N parsecs distant, then one arcsecond of angular size corresponds to N AU of physical size. So for instance, when I discovered a circumstellar disk 0.8 arcsec across 1000 pc away, I could immediately and easily know the disk was actually 800 AU in diameter. I don't really care that I'm looking at photons emitted 3260 years ago - that's not interesting from a standpoint of figuring out the astrophysics. So light years are pretty useless. From a physical perspective, arcseconds and parsecs are great units since they make it so easy to convert between angular and physical sizes.
Now, this all gets harder for extragalactic distances since the relation goes nonlinear due to relativistic spacetime expansion. But none of that extragalactic stuff is very interesting, anyway.;-)
A little known, and mainly forgotten fact is that the S, P, D and F designations mean something: Back in the early days of spectroscopy, chemists looking at the emissions given off by the different elements took to classifying them in groups, which they labeled "Sharp", "Principle", "Diffuse" and "Fundamental".
Thank you! I've always wondered where the heck SPDF came from. Somehow, that simple one-sentence explanation you just gave never made it into any of the quantum texts I've ever seen.
Re:As a rule...
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Hubble's two main niches are 1) UV and 2) high resolution in visible, UV, and near IR. Although JWST is touted by NASA's PR department as a "replacement" for the HST, it in fact does not do #1 at all.
In fact it's worse than that. JWST is entirely an infrared scope. When HST goes down, we essentially lose all capability for visible-light high resolution imaging. With no replacement telescope even vaguely in planning (unless TPF gets rescoped to have a wide-field camera too... which would be cool but is unlikely) it'd be a long, long time before we have a HST-like capability again.
And if anything, I should be biased toward JWST: I'm an infrared astronomer by trade. But I recognize that the infrared isn't everything, not by a long shot, and so JWST is not a replacement for Hubble.
Speaking as an astronomer...
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 1
... I'm utterly appalled at the decision to not service HST. This view is essentially universal among all the professional astronomers that I know.
I certainly don't claim to have done a rigorous survey of the field, but here at Berkeley, at Santa Cruz, and at Caltech, pretty much anyone you ask will say that HST has been returning fantastic science, has unique capabilities that nothing else can match, and there's no technical reason why the servicing mission shouldn't be done. Speaking personally, I work in adaptive optics, which many people will tell you lets ground-based telescopes outperform Hubble. It's not that simple: in some circumstances AO does do that, but in others (for large fields of view or at visible wavelengths) it does not, nor is it likely to do so sooner than a decade from now, maybe more. HST has by far the highest resolution available in visible light, and it'll be devastating to lose that capability.
I'd like to know if it's theorically possible to keep both in orbit and use them in parallel somehow, in the same way that ground-based radio telescopes have been linked together in arrays. Probably not worth the hassle?
Linking two telescopes together to act as a biggest telescope is called interferometry. It's not even remotely feasible to do interferometry between HST and JWST: Neither has anywhere near the right sort of instrumentation necessary for interferometry. Further, ground-based interferometry is challenging enough with the state-of-the-art in the optical or infrared being a separation of a few hundred meters. You want to try combining the beams from two telescopes a million kilometers apart moving at thousands of kilometers per hour relative to one another? No way.
What would be possible is to use the two telescopes to study the same objects at different wavelengths simultaneously. We already do this with our space telescopes: HST in the optical, Chandra and XMM in the X-ray, and now SIRTF in the infrared. JWST's going to be ten times larger than SIRTF (which will be dead by then anyway after exhausting its coolant). Thus there's a strong scientific argument for keeping HST going at least for a little while simultaneously with JWST. Alas, that's probably not going to happen...
Actually, there was a microphone included on the 2001 Mars Polar Lander, which sadly did not survive its landing. However, it looks like they're going to try again on the 2007 NetLander mission.
Of course, it's actually a $100,000 mic, but hey, that's pretty close to $0.25 in space dollars.:-)
I noticed in the main article that Jerry Nelson is regarded as ex-faculty of UCSC, any idea why, what impact this could be?
The article is incorrect; Jerry's still at UCSC, where in fact he's the director of the Center for Adaptive Optics and project scientist for the Thirty Meter Telescope. He's working pretty much full time on extremely large telescope design and adaptive optics these days.
As for the telescope array, I haven't heard anything about a radio telescope array under development by Santa Cruz. The original poster is more likely thinking of the Allen Telescope Array under construction by UC Berkeley (where I am an astronomer) and the SETI Institute. The ATA will consist of some 350 3 meter dishes located in northern California, and will be used both for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and for more "traditional" radio astronomy observations.
He's agreeing with you that the human eye sucks at blue (where by "suck" we mean "has low resolution for detail"), and furthermore is saying that the reason for this has to do with the spatial density of blue-sensitive cones on the retina.
Here, take a look at this
page by Austin Roorda, a vision scientist at the University of Houston. He shows images of the cells in some test subjects' eyes, with the images colored to indicate which cells detect which colors of light. You can see at a glance that the eye has far fewer blue-sensitive cells than green or red sensitive cells. Thus, the few blue cells which are there are spread far apart. Hence we have much worse angular resolution in the blue than we do for red or green.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a vision scientist myself. I do hang out with them on a regular basis, however.)
Actually, that's almost entirely correct - just not complete. There were two tests using completely different techniques: a dirt-simple test which gave a rough answer (essentially a knife-edge test, for any readers out there who know some optics), and an exceptionally complicated test using a tremendously sensitive device called a null corrector, which was supposed to give a far more precise answer than the rough test. The fleck of paint wasn't under a bolt, it was off one of the internal surfaces of the null corrector, and the glint of light from the missing paint caused the null corrector to be mis-focused ever so slightly, leading to a faulty measurement.
In any case, the real failure is this: Faced with a very high-tech test that said the mirror was perfect, and a very simple test that said the mirror was way the hell off, management said, "Eh, screw it. Ignore the knife edge test, it's gotta be wrong somehow 'cause the null corrector test says the mirror's fine." Given two conflicting pieces of data, you never just ignore one that says there's a problem! Either repeat the measurement and prove the first one was wrong, or you'd better have a good explanation of why the really simple, hard-to-get-wrong test failed the mirror.
(Disclaimer: I *am* an astronomer, but I wasn't there when any of this happened, and this is a rather simplified version of events, but it summarizes the essential facts about what went on.)
The original article is rather low on actual technical information, being instead just an interview with Richard Ellis, and while Richard is a great guy, he's only one of (very!) many individuals working to make the thirty meter telescope a reality.
I thought I'd introduce some more facts into the discussion.
There were, until recently, two major independent efforts to develop a 30 m optical/IR telescope:
The California Extremely Large Telescope project, brought to you by the same folks responsible for the Keck telescopes - that is, the University of California and Caltech.
Both have done design studies and both came up with fairly similar designs.
Given the reality that this telescope is going to cost something north of $600 million dollars when all is said and done, the two groups have recently decided to pool all their efforts, signing an cooperation agreement back in August.
As part of this, both groups applied for about $35M of funding for the next stage of the development, which will involve doing more detailed design studies, simulations, and construction of subsystem mockups to test performance. The plan is after about three years of this to have a completed design and then be able to break ground around 2008 or so, and become operational around a decade from now.
Incidentally, NOAO asked for their $35M from the National Science Foundation, while the UC/Caltech team approached the Moore Foundation, Gordon Moore's philanthropic organization. So a tiny fraction of every dollar you spend on an Intel chip may someday help to make this telescope a reality!
I can say for sure there's no import duties on books from England, at least not for personal-sized purchases. (I make no promises if you're trying to buy a shipping crate full of 2,000 texts!)
How do I know? I purchased an astrophysics text from England a
while ago, and never paid any import duties. I didn't think much about it at the time - it's a book from a British publisher, so I just bought it directly from their web site. No sweat. Meanwhile, my girlfriend also recently bought the complete Harry Potter box set of the British versions from Amazon.co.uk. No import duties there, either.
By copying this product onto the hard-drive of your computer, or into memory at runtime, you are making a copy of our copyrighted work. This is illegal.
On the other hand, vat-grown sapphires a foot across are routinely used as high-grade optical windows for scientific equipment, yet (to my knowledge) the price of sapphires for jewelry hasn't dropped through the floor yet. So it's not a foregone conclusion that synthetic diamonds will wipe the floor with the real ones.
Is anyone else having this problem? The Business Week page is consistently fatal to Mozilla on both my Red Hat desktop and Debian laptop. It gets about a third of the way through the page load and then *poof* no more Mozilla - instant vanishing act.
Normally I'd just chalk this up to isolated Mozilla suckage, but it happens on both my boxes, every single time I try to load that page. Anyone else encountering this?
If you read the articles linked to, they state that the museum was used as a base by some of the Iraqi resistance. US troops couldn't just go in and guard the place - apparently they had to fight their way in.
Paradox used to be a major competitor. First it was Borland's (and it was great back in the day) and then Corel bought it out for integration with their Wordperfect Suite, but the backend database engine was still licensed from Borland.
Today you can still get it with Wordperfect, but it's not much in the way of a major competitor in terms of market share. It's every bit as powerful as Access, and frankly I'll take Paradox's Object Pascal-ish language over VB *any* day.
IAAA (I Am An Astrophysicist) and
Actually, when the gas goes by the pressure goes from zero to something less than zero.
is flat-out wrong. Negative pressures do show up in certain exotic bits of physics, yes, but the interstellar medium isn't one of them.
It's only an approximation to say that the pressure in space is zero. Very, very low, sure, but pressure will be some small positive number anywhere there exists an appreciable amount of gas (which is pretty much everywhere, actually).
The pressure in the local ISM is something like 10e-19 bars, give or take a bit. As far as human hearing goes, that's certainly low enough to be effectively zero, but pressure waves can and do still exist, at positive but low pressures, albeit at frequencies and volumes far far below anything we could detect by ear.
In fact, it's very useful to think of the intersteller medium as a sort of atmosphere surrounding the galaxy, complete with high and low pressure zones resulting from differential heating, winds and superwinds blowing between those regions, "weather" of a sort along the boundaries between regions of different temperatures, and so on. For more detail (a *lot* more detail) check out Spitzer's Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium or Osterbrock's Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae and Active Galactic Nuclei, hopefully available at your local university library.
This is at most a side issue, rather than a fundamental flaw in the basic concept (which I admit is something that's far overdue in Linux!). Presumably if you're intentionally installing two applications with the same name, you can simply
"alias foobar/usr/XXYYZCorp/bin/foobar" and be sure to get the one you want.
And that's only the blindingly-obvious 5 second solution. Presumably if you're hacking the shell to have this search order, then you can also hack it to have various options for configuring the order that directories are searched or overriding certain results. You could even code up a nice GUI for configuring the shell search options while you 're at it.
My point is, there's lots of things that can be done about this point. It's nowhere near a fatal flaw, and the idea is a damn good one.
The obvious solution here is a variable ballast. Want to deliver a heavier thing? Just take off some of the ballast. The problem then becomes the return trip, but that's solved easily enough by requiring the recipient of the letter to send a reply.;-)
Until we get a new generation of reusable spaceship going, let's go back to that.
The problem is, where do you expect that next generation of reusable spacecraft to come from? If you spend all your money developing a single-use capsule system, that leaves no funding left for developing the next generation. (And it would require developing the capsules, essentially from scratch. All of the Apollo toolsets are long since destroyed, the workers retired or deceased, and the vast majority of the components are no longer available. You can't go back to Apollo)
Yes, Broderbund, the people who brought us Carmen Sandiego.:-) I've used their 3D Home Architect program for exactly what you're talking about here, and I thought it was pretty good. It's time consuming entering a design, because there are just SO MANY details about a room, but the UI is solid and the furniture/appliances/other crap you might want to put in your house library is pretty thorough. I used it a couple years ago so I don't know how their latest version is, but for only forty bucks it's hard to go wrong.
Quoting from that article (thanks for the link, btw): Directed-energy weapons fall into two categories so far:
high-energy lasers and HPM. Farther in the future is a plasma
of ionized gas molecules that might resemble a bolt of lightning.
OK, as cool as honest-to-god laser cannons are,
now I really want fighter jets that can
shoot lightning bolts.;-)
The carrot will be Hollywood DRM content, and the stick will be in creating the perception that MP3s, Oggs and Linux are in some way "untrusted".
Nah. Hollywood's lost already, at least as far as public opinion goes. Sure, they're doing a hell of a lot of lobbying, but that isn't stopping thirty million teenagers from swapping MP3s. Those thirty million aren't going to want to lose the ability to play their music where and when they want to, on whatever hardware they want to. Anything that moves in that direction is going to be a complete non-starter in the retail commercial world.
The Buran actually flew and according to most reports is very reliable compared to the space shuttle (12 years of testing, can fly
automatically).
Say what? Buran flew once, repeat, once. Based on that, how exactly are you making the leap to say that it's "very reliable compared to the space shuttle"? One flight tells you precisely nothing about how the hardware ages over time, what the likely failures will be, what the cost of ongoing maintenence is, and a whole lot more.
Besides which, they're only selling the hardware here. If you want to do anything with it, you'd need to buy all the engineers from the program that made it, and all of their records, software, special equipment, and more. You think experimental space craft come with nice easy-to-read owners' manuals? It would be vastly, tremendously, hugely more expensive to get Buran back into flight condition than to start from scratch and build something capable of using existing US infrastructure.
I don't know of any AO systems on large telescopes that deform the secondary mirror.
Actually, I believe the MMT is experimenting with a deformable secondary.
Heck, some of the folks at Arizona briefly had a telescope with a deformable primary running, just to prove the concept. ('course, it had a two centimeter aperture - I never said it was a *big* primary.;-)
As someone working on AO systems myself, one of the primary advantages AO has over Hubble, at least theoretically, is that we can use larger telescopes on the ground. HST's only 2.4m, remember. Keck has 16 times more collecting area and potentially four times higher resolution. On the timescales at which NGST will fly, we'll likely have 30m telescopes on the ground. AO lets us get imaging performance out of them almost, but not quite, as good as if we could fly 'em in space - at a fraction of the cost, though only for certain observations. The technologies are, as you say, going to remain complimentary far into the future.
Slashdot Mirror
I must respectfully disagree quite strongly! It's parsecs that tell you something useful, not light years - and the trick is combining them with arcseconds, the other unit you unfairly malign. If something is N parsecs distant, then one arcsecond of angular size corresponds to N AU of physical size. So for instance, when I discovered a circumstellar disk 0.8 arcsec across 1000 pc away, I could immediately and easily know the disk was actually 800 AU in diameter. I don't really care that I'm looking at photons emitted 3260 years ago - that's not interesting from a standpoint of figuring out the astrophysics. So light years are pretty useless. From a physical perspective, arcseconds and parsecs are great units since they make it so easy to convert between angular and physical sizes.
Now, this all gets harder for extragalactic distances since the relation goes nonlinear due to relativistic spacetime expansion. But none of that extragalactic stuff is very interesting, anyway. ;-)
Thank you! I've always wondered where the heck SPDF came from. Somehow, that simple one-sentence explanation you just gave never made it into any of the quantum texts I've ever seen.
In fact it's worse than that. JWST is entirely an infrared scope. When HST goes down, we essentially lose all capability for visible-light high resolution imaging. With no replacement telescope even vaguely in planning (unless TPF gets rescoped to have a wide-field camera too... which would be cool but is unlikely) it'd be a long, long time before we have a HST-like capability again.
And if anything, I should be biased toward JWST: I'm an infrared astronomer by trade. But I recognize that the infrared isn't everything, not by a long shot, and so JWST is not a replacement for Hubble.
... I'm utterly appalled at the decision to not service HST. This view is essentially universal among all the professional astronomers that I know.
I certainly don't claim to have done a rigorous survey of the field, but here at Berkeley, at Santa Cruz, and at Caltech, pretty much anyone you ask will say that HST has been returning fantastic science, has unique capabilities that nothing else can match, and there's no technical reason why the servicing mission shouldn't be done. Speaking personally, I work in adaptive optics, which many people will tell you lets ground-based telescopes outperform Hubble. It's not that simple: in some circumstances AO does do that, but in others (for large fields of view or at visible wavelengths) it does not, nor is it likely to do so sooner than a decade from now, maybe more. HST has by far the highest resolution available in visible light, and it'll be devastating to lose that capability.
Linking two telescopes together to act as a biggest telescope is called interferometry. It's not even remotely feasible to do interferometry between HST and JWST: Neither has anywhere near the right sort of instrumentation necessary for interferometry. Further, ground-based interferometry is challenging enough with the state-of-the-art in the optical or infrared being a separation of a few hundred meters. You want to try combining the beams from two telescopes a million kilometers apart moving at thousands of kilometers per hour relative to one another? No way.
What would be possible is to use the two telescopes to study the same objects at different wavelengths simultaneously. We already do this with our space telescopes: HST in the optical, Chandra and XMM in the X-ray, and now SIRTF in the infrared. JWST's going to be ten times larger than SIRTF (which will be dead by then anyway after exhausting its coolant). Thus there's a strong scientific argument for keeping HST going at least for a little while simultaneously with JWST. Alas, that's probably not going to happen...
Of course, it's actually a $100,000 mic, but hey, that's pretty close to $0.25 in space dollars. :-)
The article is incorrect; Jerry's still at UCSC, where in fact he's the director of the Center for Adaptive Optics and project scientist for the Thirty Meter Telescope. He's working pretty much full time on extremely large telescope design and adaptive optics these days.
As for the telescope array, I haven't heard anything about a radio telescope array under development by Santa Cruz. The original poster is more likely thinking of the Allen Telescope Array under construction by UC Berkeley (where I am an astronomer) and the SETI Institute. The ATA will consist of some 350 3 meter dishes located in northern California, and will be used both for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and for more "traditional" radio astronomy observations.
Here, take a look at this page by Austin Roorda, a vision scientist at the University of Houston. He shows images of the cells in some test subjects' eyes, with the images colored to indicate which cells detect which colors of light. You can see at a glance that the eye has far fewer blue-sensitive cells than green or red sensitive cells. Thus, the few blue cells which are there are spread far apart. Hence we have much worse angular resolution in the blue than we do for red or green.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a vision scientist myself. I do hang out with them on a regular basis, however.)
In any case, the real failure is this: Faced with a very high-tech test that said the mirror was perfect, and a very simple test that said the mirror was way the hell off, management said, "Eh, screw it. Ignore the knife edge test, it's gotta be wrong somehow 'cause the null corrector test says the mirror's fine." Given two conflicting pieces of data, you never just ignore one that says there's a problem! Either repeat the measurement and prove the first one was wrong, or you'd better have a good explanation of why the really simple, hard-to-get-wrong test failed the mirror.
(Disclaimer: I *am* an astronomer, but I wasn't there when any of this happened, and this is a rather simplified version of events, but it summarizes the essential facts about what went on.)
I thought I'd introduce some more facts into the discussion. There were, until recently, two major independent efforts to develop a 30 m optical/IR telescope:
- The California Extremely Large Telescope project, brought to you by the same folks responsible for the Keck telescopes - that is, the University of California and Caltech.
- The Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope project, by the National Observatories, headquartered in Arizona.
Both have done design studies and both came up with fairly similar designs. Given the reality that this telescope is going to cost something north of $600 million dollars when all is said and done, the two groups have recently decided to pool all their efforts, signing an cooperation agreement back in August.As part of this, both groups applied for about $35M of funding for the next stage of the development, which will involve doing more detailed design studies, simulations, and construction of subsystem mockups to test performance. The plan is after about three years of this to have a completed design and then be able to break ground around 2008 or so, and become operational around a decade from now.
Incidentally, NOAO asked for their $35M from the National Science Foundation, while the UC/Caltech team approached the Moore Foundation, Gordon Moore's philanthropic organization. So a tiny fraction of every dollar you spend on an Intel chip may someday help to make this telescope a reality!
How do I know? I purchased an astrophysics text from England a while ago, and never paid any import duties. I didn't think much about it at the time - it's a book from a British publisher, so I just bought it directly from their web site. No sweat. Meanwhile, my girlfriend also recently bought the complete Harry Potter box set of the British versions from Amazon.co.uk. No import duties there, either.
This is not true. US Copyright law explicitly allows copies of software to be made if those copies are necessary for the operation of that software within a computer. US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117, paragraph (a)(1).
On the other hand, vat-grown sapphires a foot across are routinely used as high-grade optical windows for scientific equipment, yet (to my knowledge) the price of sapphires for jewelry hasn't dropped through the floor yet. So it's not a foregone conclusion that synthetic diamonds will wipe the floor with the real ones.
Is anyone else having this problem? The Business Week page is consistently fatal to Mozilla on both my Red Hat desktop and Debian laptop. It gets about a third of the way through the page load and then
*poof* no more Mozilla - instant vanishing act.
Normally I'd just chalk this up to isolated Mozilla suckage, but it happens on both my boxes, every single time I try to load that page. Anyone else encountering this?
If you read the articles linked to, they state that the museum was used as a base by some of the Iraqi resistance. US troops couldn't just go in and guard the place - apparently they had to fight their way in.
Paradox used to be a major competitor. First it was Borland's (and it was great back in the day) and then Corel bought it out for integration with their Wordperfect Suite, but the backend database engine was still licensed from Borland.
Today you can still get it with Wordperfect, but it's not much in the way of a major competitor in terms of market share. It's every bit as powerful as Access, and frankly I'll take Paradox's Object Pascal-ish language over VB *any* day.
Actually, when the gas goes by the pressure goes from zero to something less than zero.
is flat-out wrong. Negative pressures do show up in certain exotic bits of physics, yes, but the interstellar medium isn't one of them.
It's only an approximation to say that the pressure in space is zero. Very, very low, sure, but pressure will be some small positive number anywhere there exists an appreciable amount of gas (which is pretty much everywhere, actually). The pressure in the local ISM is something like 10e-19 bars, give or take a bit. As far as human hearing goes, that's certainly low enough to be effectively zero, but pressure waves can and do still exist, at positive but low pressures, albeit at frequencies and volumes far far below anything we could detect by ear.
In fact, it's very useful to think of the intersteller medium as a sort of atmosphere surrounding the galaxy, complete with high and low pressure zones resulting from differential heating, winds and superwinds blowing between those regions, "weather" of a sort along the boundaries between regions of different temperatures, and so on. For more detail (a *lot* more detail) check out Spitzer's Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium or Osterbrock's Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae and Active Galactic Nuclei, hopefully available at your local university library.
And that's only the blindingly-obvious 5 second solution. Presumably if you're hacking the shell to have this search order, then you can also hack it to have various options for configuring the order that directories are searched or overriding certain results. You could even code up a nice GUI for configuring the shell search options while you 're at it.
My point is, there's lots of things that can be done about this point. It's nowhere near a fatal flaw, and the idea is a damn good one.
The obvious solution here is a variable ballast. ;-)
Want to deliver a heavier thing? Just take off some of the ballast. The problem then becomes the return trip, but that's solved easily enough by requiring the recipient of the letter to send a reply.
The problem is, where do you expect that next generation of reusable spacecraft to come from? If you spend all your money developing a single-use capsule system, that leaves no funding left for developing the next generation. (And it would require developing the capsules, essentially from scratch. All of the Apollo toolsets are long since destroyed, the workers retired or deceased, and the vast majority of the components are no longer available. You can't go back to Apollo)
You can't go forward by going backward.
Yes, Broderbund, the people who brought us Carmen Sandiego. :-) I've used their 3D Home Architect program for exactly what you're talking about here, and I thought it was pretty good. It's time consuming entering a design, because there are just SO MANY details about a room, but the UI is solid and the furniture/appliances/other crap you might want to put in your house library is pretty thorough. I used it a couple years ago so I don't know how their latest version is, but for only forty bucks it's hard to go wrong.
Directed-energy weapons fall into two categories so far: high-energy lasers and HPM. Farther in the future is a plasma of ionized gas molecules that might resemble a bolt of lightning.
OK, as cool as honest-to-god laser cannons are, now I really want fighter jets that can shoot lightning bolts. ;-)
Nah. Hollywood's lost already, at least as far as public opinion goes. Sure, they're doing a hell of a lot of lobbying, but that isn't stopping
thirty million teenagers from swapping MP3s. Those thirty million aren't going to want to lose the ability to play their music where and when they want to, on whatever hardware they want to. Anything that moves in that direction is going to be a complete non-starter in the retail commercial world.
automatically).
Say what? Buran flew once, repeat, once. Based on that, how exactly are you making the leap to say that it's "very reliable compared to the space shuttle"? One flight tells you precisely nothing about how the hardware ages over time, what the likely failures will be, what the cost of ongoing maintenence is, and a whole lot more.
Besides which, they're only selling the hardware here. If you want to do anything with it, you'd need to buy all the engineers from the program that made it, and all of their records, software, special equipment, and more. You think experimental space craft come with nice easy-to-read owners' manuals? It would be vastly, tremendously, hugely more expensive to get Buran back into flight condition than to start from scratch and build something capable of using existing US infrastructure.
Actually, I believe the MMT is experimenting with a deformable secondary. Heck, some of the folks at Arizona briefly had a telescope with a deformable primary running, just to prove the concept. ('course, it had a two centimeter aperture - I never said it was a *big* primary. ;-)
As someone working on AO systems myself, one of the primary advantages AO has over Hubble, at least theoretically, is that we can use larger telescopes on the ground. HST's only 2.4m, remember. Keck has 16 times more collecting area and potentially four times higher resolution. On the timescales at which NGST will fly, we'll likely have 30m telescopes on the ground. AO lets us get imaging performance out of them almost, but not quite, as good as if we could fly 'em in space - at a fraction of the cost, though only for certain observations. The technologies are, as you say, going to remain complimentary far into the future.