Cost seems to be something that has been left out of most of the public debate about HST, at least cost with respect to the observational science. If the goal of the repair mission is to keep the science return flowing, replace. If it's to do something really hard, and keep the science flowing as a side effect, then the robotic thing starts to make more sense. One of the sibling posts addressed this, too.
I don't think you'll get three telescopes that size for $1.6B (probably only 2), but I bet the HST repair will cost more than that anyway. You also have to save a few hundred $M for a robotic module to deorbit HST-- there are too many parts that won't disintegrate to let it come down wherever it wants.
Another sibling post brought up that a deorbit robit will cost $$. It will cost a lot less than a repair robot-- all it has to do is find the launch adapter interfaces, connect into them, and bring it down. The avionics can be relatively low cost, since they only have to last a few weeks or months, and there doesn't have to be a lot of fancy software to avoid damaging the instruments while making the repair.
To address the launch vehicle (as brought up by a sibling post) - there are expendables that are plenty capable of launching HST sized telescopes and larger for lower cost. Some of them are even US made. Even better, some of them are capable of getting a telescope that size out to L2, where the throughput is much higher and the rad environment probably less. HST goes in and out of sunlight every 90 minutes or so, which wreaks havoc on stability for targeting, and depending on what target you're looking at it may get occulted by the earth for a large part of every orbit. HST also passed through the South Atlantic Anomaly regularly, which isn't good for detectors. At L2 your non-observing time will be dominated by housekeeping and calibration rather than the orbit.
Lastly, if you replace it with a similar quality optical telescope you wouldn't build a duplicate anyway. Technology has changed a lot since HST was designed, and you can redesign and build something similar for a lot less these days. You would fly a much lighter weight telescope, which would bring down the launch cost substantially.
Most places will have pizza delivery, Chinese food, and Walmart./i?
Yeah, but will the chinese food be so hot it makes your eyeballs bleed? Only place I've been able to find that is LA (and maybe Sichuan, but that's a long way to move).
Is the cat somehow necessary for it to work well (the hairballs keep the bearings from seizing)? Will it work better since I have four of them? How about ducks? Do they improve the performance?
I satsified my art requirement as an undergrad by taking a holography as art semi-independent study. I was a physics student, and the other guy taking it was an art student. I don't think he ever managed to make a hologram because he couldn't align the spatial filters. My art sucked, but I had no trouble getting good holograms.
There were two tables-- the small one used a lot of heavy blocks in the base to make it massive, and I think it only had sand for isolation, no air legs, and a half a pool table for a top. The other table was nicer-- it had air legs made form inner tubes (works fine) and the surface was a full sized pool table slate that was resting on a bunch of tennis balls laid out in an irregular 2-D array to avoid creating bad resonant modes.
It was in the basement of the dorm that held the college for lefties (within a much larger university) and part of the room was under a stairwell. Most of the time you just had to make sure nobody had come down the stairs in the last few minutes, and do it at an hour when it was reasonably unlikely that someone would come down the stairs during a 1 minute or so exposure. For super stability, there was a setup using a mechanism from an HO railroad track switch, and you would sit outside the room (so as not to disturb the air inside) for a half hour or so, and then make the exposure.
The hardest part of the whole thing was that the spatial filters were made from microscopes turned on their sides, with the pinhole mounted in the stage and the stages tended to drift.
It's quite possible (as other people have mentioned) to make good quality holograms on a budget, and I even believe the $99 kit (and may have to order it just for fun). The biggest problem with that kit is probably the coherence length of the laser, but a little care can probably mitigate that. That, and keeping the cats out of the kitchen while I do it.
I get to play with expensive optics in fancy labs now, but you can still get bad results if you don't use them carefully. A lot of what they save you is time, and the other thing you get is higher precision, but you don't need super precision for visible holograms--a tenth of a wave or so and you can probably get nice results.
The camera had the ability to shunt the IR filter to the side and film in near-infrared.
If you put this filter/beamsplitter in front of the lens you could reflect the IR from the anti-pirate system off to the side, much like a stealth plane reflects radar to somewhere other than the detector. A little bit of careful beamsplitter/filter selection and the camera is invisible again, and can still see the screen.
Then they'll start putting detectors all over the theater to catch the light that pirates reflected off to the side, and the pirates will start bouncing the light to the side and into a cavity where it's absorbed, and the detector people will look for the missing energy, and it will go on and on, and as the pirates have to get more sophisticated they'll start being producing even better quality bootlegs, and getting into a movie will be worse than going through airport security, which will make otherwise avid moviegoers want bootlegs even more....
Why don't they just release movies all over at about the same time and save everyone the trouble?
It's not just welfare in those numbers. It's total federal expenditures per capita, which can include highway money, defense contracts (of which California companies get huge amounts, but it doesn't tip CA into being a net receiver), farm subsidies, post-hurricane FEMA money, etc. Not sure if it includes military bases/salaries.
I asked literally more than 20 people if they could give me a jump, but noone could or would help me.
Weird. I was once at a party with a bunch of urban people where someone was parked in and nobody could find the offending owner. A bunch of guys came out and lifted the car out of the way. And this wasn't a frat party-- it was serious film/music/art/lefty crowd.
I grew up in a very urban area and stop to help people all the time. I change a lot of flats for people on bicycles (who should all know how, but don't). I'll give anybody who needs one a jump if there are cables available within a reasonable time (I still carry them, since I grew up in the upper midwest). I've pushed a lot of cars out of snow because I can bike in much deeper snow than people can drive (bike gets stuck you lift it up), and used to always come across people who needed a push.
I suspect in San Diego getting a jump is a problem because nobody has any idea how because there's no winter, and electricity and cars both scare people.
Modern conservatives hold the belief of independence from the state
That's a nice thought and theory on why people vote that way, but if you look at how much is paid per capita in taxes vs. how much is received in federal expenditures, the people in the red states are predominantly on the receiving end of the taxes paid by the people in the blue states:
That, or they could emit some kind of solvent (that sounds really unpleasant) that dissolves the fat so it can be mobilized and sucked up by the hose. Ick.
yes i know it would take *a lot* of soy crop to meet the US oil consumption
That's why we need "Lipodiesel"-- when you climb into your SUV, you plug a little hose into a couple stents in your thighs and belly, and it gives you liposuction treatment while you drive, sending the fat into your engine to propel the vehicle. This would solve both the oil problem and the fat problem plaguing the united states, would mean that lazyass drivers wouldn't have to exercise, and could not only eat all the french fries they wanted, they would need to in order to fuel the vehicle. You just stop at the McDonalds drive-thru to fill up.
If you live in a non-swing state and are prefer the candidate that's not dominant in your state it's still important to vote. In the case of the presidential vote it does help send a message (that may or may not be heard) that the state is not a monolithic block.
It's also important to vote because even when the presidential vote is lopsided, some of the congressional votes may not be, and sometimes even the senate. There are also state elections, and local elections, and in many cases these are less about partisanship and more about constituent service.
Here in California we also vote on all sorts of referenda and amendments to the state constitution. It's quite the list of things to keep track of.
I got the impression from my friend that she was only getting the presidential boxes, but I think those are probably the only ones she really cared about.
I live in a non-swing state, so I've been volunteering for some get-out-the-vote-in-swing-states phone banking over the past couple days, and I no longer believe the polls. People in swing states are getting so many phone calls that many of them no longer answer the phone, they put messages on their machine saying if it's a political call please go away, they hang up right away, etc. They are extremely popular right now, and most of them seem to wish it would all go away.
On the few occasions that you do get a a live person, pretty frequently they say "this is my fifth call today, and someone just left the front door, would you please take us off your list". I apologize, and thank them, but because many of the groups aren't allowed to coordinate (or don't when they could), getting off one group's list doesn't help much.
The pollsters are calling all the same people, and probably having just as hard a time. They have to make a lot of corrections for systematic error, and I would suspect that the popularity of the swing state voters makes their correction factors less useful than in a more typical year.
Every once in a while you get someone who didn't know where to go to vote, or who needs help getting to the poll (which we help with). They make it worthwhile.
Except he's a US citizen living abroad, which is not the same as not a US citizen.
A friend of mine recently moved to Canada for work and told me that lots of US expats she knows there are voting for the first time in years (often for the first time since they left). If you're living abroad you vote in the last state where you were a resident and you only get to vote for president (maybe senate, too, but I think just prez). Many of those people last lived, and are very likely to vote for Kerry (in Canada, the far right is mostly to the left of the US Dems).
It gets you above a lot of atmosphere more efficiently than punching through it. People have also proposed using balloons to get even higher before firing the rocket, but that hasn't been done yet. The pegasus is a relatively cheap way to get relatively small payloads to orbit. Firing the rocket doesn't affect the aircraft-- they separate first. The limit is more how large a rocket you can haul up with an airplane (i.e. how big an airplane you can reasonably build)
As for big expendables being big, heavy, and fragile, they're certainly big and heavy, they aren't necessarily fragile. The Soviet Union was developing "big, dumb booster" when the US was doing the shuttle. Rather than being designed at the edge of technology for high efficiency, they were designed to work and be cheap. The Russian launch vehicles (Soyuz and Eurockot) are very capable, low cost and quite reliable.
Yeah-- I'm just finally learning Perl for my own entertainment, but I spent part of the summer shopping for launch vehicles... I got to see an X-34 fuselage up close and personal (within a few feet) a couple days after the program was cancelled. (I was out there for a meeting unrelated to X-34).
I have to put something in my/. journal about why the moon is a suboptimal place to build a space telescope-- I've already had to answer that about 3 times.
Orbital rockets are big, heavy, and fragile, and launching one from a stable ground platform is hugely easier than launching from a flying aircraft.
Tell that to Orbital (http://www.orbital.com/SpaceLaunch/) They've been launching to orbit for a while with the Pegasus system that drops a rocket from the bottom of an L-1011.
NASA is actually a pretty small part of the customer base for the launch vehicle makers. LV development is driven much more by DOD and commercial needs than by NASA needs.
With the exception of the shuttle and subsidizing development of high-risk new LV technologies (mostly leaning toward reusables) NASA really isn't in the launch business. NASA does run KSC, but the people who handle launches on all the expendables are all Boeing and Lockheed (I don't know if Orbital launches out of KSC at all). Vandenberg is an Air Force Base, and again, while the gov't provides the land and the clear range, all the launching is pretty much private industry.
Space has already been quite commercialized by the US in many respects-- communication sats are all paid for by the people who want them, built by private industry, and launched by private industry. It's a pretty competitive market, and the end of the cold war is making it more so. Iridium (technically well done but with a bad business model) launched all over the place, including Russia and China-- they had a lot of satellites to launch and cost mattered a lot.
The shuttle actually did hold back launch vehicle development for a while-- while it was in development private industry was pretty much prohibited from developing competing expendables. I think that changed primarily because of Challenger-- the air force didn't want to be dependent on the shuttle.
People listen to it because it's played. There were a couple articles in the LA Weekly about a month ago about how CD sales are actually going back up, but the way they're distributed is changing. The top sellers are selling fewer than ever, but the smaller labels (whether independent or boutique from the majors) are selling more, and the authors attribute this to file sharing-- people are no longer limited to radio or their circle of friends for previewing new music. They can preview with shared files, and if they like it buy more (and higher quality) recordings.
The problem is that the light from the two mirrors has to be cophased to within 1/10 of a single wavelength of UV light. Those tolerances are absolute bastards to achieve, even in outer space.
Spirit is intended to be in the IR, which makes the pathlength control a bit easier, and without knowing details of Spirit, I'd guess that the pathlength control requirements are a lot easier than they are on SIM, which is doing precision astrometry in the visible.
This seems to come up every time there's a space telescope article. The moon's not that great a place-- it's not as stable as you think, it's dirty, you get cycled in and out of full sunlight, and you have to land everything softly in a nasty gravity well without any atmosphere to use for braking.
I'm going to have to put in a journal entry or something with why the moon is overrated for space telescopes.
from looking at the sunshades, I'd guess that they plan to put Spirit in an L2 or earth trailing orbit, most likely L2-- it's close enough for high bandwidth communication, and it actually takes slightly less energy to get there than earth trailing.
The other mission they mentioned, SIM, won't do spectroscopy. It's a very high precision interferometer for astrometry-- it will measure positions of stars to a microarcsecond or so. I can't remember the down to earth comparison information, but it will be capable of detecting planets of a few earth masses in their stars' habitable zones around the nearest 250 or so stars. It will also remove the sin(i) ambiguity of the radial velocity measurements of the planets already known. There are also a bunch of other science programs covering stellar astrophysics, and some extragalactic stuff, too.
None of the above, except the warm beverages, but I prefer hot coffee (rather than iced) even when it's 105F out, which isn't unusual here in the summer. They don't seem to put me to sleep.
I'm quite fit, and that actually leads me to prefer it cooler-- I generate a lot of heat. I drink vast quantities of water, only a few cups of coffee during the day. My sitting around (as opposed to resting) pulse is about 60. I really prefer the temperature to be about 68-70F, and I can't wear long sleeves, and prefer to wear shorts.
Slashdot Mirror
Cost seems to be something that has been left out of most of the public debate about HST, at least cost with respect to the observational science. If the goal of the repair mission is to keep the science return flowing, replace. If it's to do something really hard, and keep the science flowing as a side effect, then the robotic thing starts to make more sense. One of the sibling posts addressed this, too.
I don't think you'll get three telescopes that size for $1.6B (probably only 2), but I bet the HST repair will cost more than that anyway. You also have to save a few hundred $M for a robotic module to deorbit HST-- there are too many parts that won't disintegrate to let it come down wherever it wants.
Another sibling post brought up that a deorbit robit will cost $$. It will cost a lot less than a repair robot-- all it has to do is find the launch adapter interfaces, connect into them, and bring it down. The avionics can be relatively low cost, since they only have to last a few weeks or months, and there doesn't have to be a lot of fancy software to avoid damaging the instruments while making the repair.
To address the launch vehicle (as brought up by a sibling post) - there are expendables that are plenty capable of launching HST sized telescopes and larger for lower cost. Some of them are even US made. Even better, some of them are capable of getting a telescope that size out to L2, where the throughput is much higher and the rad environment probably less. HST goes in and out of sunlight every 90 minutes or so, which wreaks havoc on stability for targeting, and depending on what target you're looking at it may get occulted by the earth for a large part of every orbit. HST also passed through the South Atlantic Anomaly regularly, which isn't good for detectors. At L2 your non-observing time will be dominated by housekeeping and calibration rather than the orbit.
Lastly, if you replace it with a similar quality optical telescope you wouldn't build a duplicate anyway. Technology has changed a lot since HST was designed, and you can redesign and build something similar for a lot less these days. You would fly a much lighter weight telescope, which would bring down the launch cost substantially.
Most places will have pizza delivery, Chinese food, and Walmart./i?
Yeah, but will the chinese food be so hot it makes your eyeballs bleed? Only place I've been able to find that is LA (and maybe Sichuan, but that's a long way to move).
Is the cat somehow necessary for it to work well (the hairballs keep the bearings from seizing)? Will it work better since I have four of them? How about ducks? Do they improve the performance?
You don't have to have that much stuff.
I satsified my art requirement as an undergrad by taking a holography as art semi-independent study. I was a physics student, and the other guy taking it was an art student. I don't think he ever managed to make a hologram because he couldn't align the spatial filters. My art sucked, but I had no trouble getting good holograms.
There were two tables-- the small one used a lot of heavy blocks in the base to make it massive, and I think it only had sand for isolation, no air legs, and a half a pool table for a top. The other table was nicer-- it had air legs made form inner tubes (works fine) and the surface was a full sized pool table slate that was resting on a bunch of tennis balls laid out in an irregular 2-D array to avoid creating bad resonant modes.
It was in the basement of the dorm that held the college for lefties (within a much larger university) and part of the room was under a stairwell. Most of the time you just had to make sure nobody had come down the stairs in the last few minutes, and do it at an hour when it was reasonably unlikely that someone would come down the stairs during a 1 minute or so exposure. For super stability, there was a setup using a mechanism from an HO railroad track switch, and you would sit outside the room (so as not to disturb the air inside) for a half hour or so, and then make the exposure.
The hardest part of the whole thing was that the spatial filters were made from microscopes turned on their sides, with the pinhole mounted in the stage and the stages tended to drift.
It's quite possible (as other people have mentioned) to make good quality holograms on a budget, and I even believe the $99 kit (and may have to order it just for fun). The biggest problem with that kit is probably the coherence length of the laser, but a little care can probably mitigate that. That, and keeping the cats out of the kitchen while I do it.
I get to play with expensive optics in fancy labs now, but you can still get bad results if you don't use them carefully. A lot of what they save you is time, and the other thing you get is higher precision, but you don't need super precision for visible holograms--a tenth of a wave or so and you can probably get nice results.
The camera had the ability to shunt the IR filter to the side and film in near-infrared.
If you put this filter/beamsplitter in front of the lens you could reflect the IR from the anti-pirate system off to the side, much like a stealth plane reflects radar to somewhere other than the detector. A little bit of careful beamsplitter/filter selection and the camera is invisible again, and can still see the screen.
Then they'll start putting detectors all over the theater to catch the light that pirates reflected off to the side, and the pirates will start bouncing the light to the side and into a cavity where it's absorbed, and the detector people will look for the missing energy, and it will go on and on, and as the pirates have to get more sophisticated they'll start being producing even better quality bootlegs, and getting into a movie will be worse than going through airport security, which will make otherwise avid moviegoers want bootlegs even more....
Why don't they just release movies all over at about the same time and save everyone the trouble?
It's not just welfare in those numbers. It's total federal expenditures per capita, which can include highway money, defense contracts (of which California companies get huge amounts, but it doesn't tip CA into being a net receiver), farm subsidies, post-hurricane FEMA money, etc. Not sure if it includes military bases/salaries.
I asked literally more than 20 people if they could give me a jump, but noone could or would help me.
Weird. I was once at a party with a bunch of urban people where someone was parked in and nobody could find the offending owner. A bunch of guys came out and lifted the car out of the way. And this wasn't a frat party-- it was serious film/music/art/lefty crowd.
I grew up in a very urban area and stop to help people all the time. I change a lot of flats for people on bicycles (who should all know how, but don't). I'll give anybody who needs one a jump if there are cables available within a reasonable time (I still carry them, since I grew up in the upper midwest). I've pushed a lot of cars out of snow because I can bike in much deeper snow than people can drive (bike gets stuck you lift it up), and used to always come across people who needed a push.
I suspect in San Diego getting a jump is a problem because nobody has any idea how because there's no winter, and electricity and cars both scare people.
Modern conservatives hold the belief of independence from the state
That's a nice thought and theory on why people vote that way, but if you look at how much is paid per capita in taxes vs. how much is received in federal expenditures, the people in the red states are predominantly on the receiving end of the taxes paid by the people in the blue states:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxingspending.html
I'd really like to see a map overlay, but it looks to me like they vote like vampires...because they certainly aren't opposed to welfare.
They also seem way too interested in controlling what happens inside other peoples' bedrooms and bodies.
That, or they could emit some kind of solvent (that sounds really unpleasant) that dissolves the fat so it can be mobilized and sucked up by the hose. Ick.
yes i know it would take *a lot* of soy crop to meet the US oil consumption
That's why we need "Lipodiesel"-- when you climb into your SUV, you plug a little hose into a couple stents in your thighs and belly, and it gives you liposuction treatment while you drive, sending the fat into your engine to propel the vehicle. This would solve both the oil problem and the fat problem plaguing the united states, would mean that lazyass drivers wouldn't have to exercise, and could not only eat all the french fries they wanted, they would need to in order to fuel the vehicle. You just stop at the McDonalds drive-thru to fill up.
If you live in a non-swing state and are prefer the candidate that's not dominant in your state it's still important to vote. In the case of the presidential vote it does help send a message (that may or may not be heard) that the state is not a monolithic block.
It's also important to vote because even when the presidential vote is lopsided, some of the congressional votes may not be, and sometimes even the senate. There are also state elections, and local elections, and in many cases these are less about partisanship and more about constituent service.
Here in California we also vote on all sorts of referenda and amendments to the state constitution. It's quite the list of things to keep track of.
I got the impression from my friend that she was only getting the presidential boxes, but I think those are probably the only ones she really cared about.
Makes sense that you can't vote for local things.
The only poll that really matters is tomorrows.
Absolutely.
I live in a non-swing state, so I've been volunteering for some get-out-the-vote-in-swing-states phone banking over the past couple days, and I no longer believe the polls. People in swing states are getting so many phone calls that many of them no longer answer the phone, they put messages on their machine saying if it's a political call please go away, they hang up right away, etc. They are extremely popular right now, and most of them seem to wish it would all go away.
On the few occasions that you do get a a live person, pretty frequently they say "this is my fifth call today, and someone just left the front door, would you please take us off your list". I apologize, and thank them, but because many of the groups aren't allowed to coordinate (or don't when they could), getting off one group's list doesn't help much.
The pollsters are calling all the same people, and probably having just as hard a time. They have to make a lot of corrections for systematic error, and I would suspect that the popularity of the swing state voters makes their correction factors less useful than in a more typical year.
Every once in a while you get someone who didn't know where to go to vote, or who needs help getting to the poll (which we help with). They make it worthwhile.
Except he's a US citizen living abroad, which is not the same as not a US citizen.
A friend of mine recently moved to Canada for work and told me that lots of US expats she knows there are voting for the first time in years (often for the first time since they left). If you're living abroad you vote in the last state where you were a resident and you only get to vote for president (maybe senate, too, but I think just prez). Many of those people last lived, and are very likely to vote for Kerry (in Canada, the far right is mostly to the left of the US Dems).
It's going to be an interesting election night...
(sarcasm appreciated except for the nit)
but unlikely coincidences happen all of the time.
One in a billion events happen to six people on earth every day...
Most of them are probably dull and go unnoticed.
It gets you above a lot of atmosphere more efficiently than punching through it. People have also proposed using balloons to get even higher before firing the rocket, but that hasn't been done yet. The pegasus is a relatively cheap way to get relatively small payloads to orbit. Firing the rocket doesn't affect the aircraft-- they separate first. The limit is more how large a rocket you can haul up with an airplane (i.e. how big an airplane you can reasonably build)
As for big expendables being big, heavy, and fragile, they're certainly big and heavy, they aren't necessarily fragile. The Soviet Union was developing "big, dumb booster" when the US was doing the shuttle. Rather than being designed at the edge of technology for high efficiency, they were designed to work and be cheap. The Russian launch vehicles (Soyuz and Eurockot) are very capable, low cost and quite reliable.
Yeah-- I'm just finally learning Perl for my own entertainment, but I spent part of the summer shopping for launch vehicles... I got to see an X-34 fuselage up close and personal (within a few feet) a couple days after the program was cancelled. (I was out there for a meeting unrelated to X-34).
/. journal about why the moon is a suboptimal place to build a space telescope-- I've already had to answer that about 3 times.
I have to put something in my
We huddled around a 110 baud acousticoupler, and if you read something that was funny the laughing would generate errors in the connection.
Orbital rockets are big, heavy, and fragile, and launching one from a stable ground platform is hugely easier than launching from a flying aircraft.
Tell that to Orbital (http://www.orbital.com/SpaceLaunch/) They've been launching to orbit for a while with the Pegasus system that drops a rocket from the bottom of an L-1011.
Mod parent up--
NASA is actually a pretty small part of the customer base for the launch vehicle makers. LV development is driven much more by DOD and commercial needs than by NASA needs.
With the exception of the shuttle and subsidizing development of high-risk new LV technologies (mostly leaning toward reusables) NASA really isn't in the launch business. NASA does run KSC, but the people who handle launches on all the expendables are all Boeing and Lockheed (I don't know if Orbital launches out of KSC at all). Vandenberg is an Air Force Base, and again, while the gov't provides the land and the clear range, all the launching is pretty much private industry.
Space has already been quite commercialized by the US in many respects-- communication sats are all paid for by the people who want them, built by private industry, and launched by private industry. It's a pretty competitive market, and the end of the cold war is making it more so. Iridium (technically well done but with a bad business model) launched all over the place, including Russia and China-- they had a lot of satellites to launch and cost mattered a lot.
The shuttle actually did hold back launch vehicle development for a while-- while it was in development private industry was pretty much prohibited from developing competing expendables. I think that changed primarily because of Challenger-- the air force didn't want to be dependent on the shuttle.
People listen to it because it's played. There were a couple articles in the LA Weekly about a month ago about how CD sales are actually going back up, but the way they're distributed is changing. The top sellers are selling fewer than ever, but the smaller labels (whether independent or boutique from the majors) are selling more, and the authors attribute this to file sharing-- people are no longer limited to radio or their circle of friends for previewing new music. They can preview with shared files, and if they like it buy more (and higher quality) recordings.
The problem is that the light from the two mirrors has to be cophased to within 1/10 of a single wavelength of UV light. Those tolerances are absolute bastards to achieve, even in outer space.
Spirit is intended to be in the IR, which makes the pathlength control a bit easier, and without knowing details of Spirit, I'd guess that the pathlength control requirements are a lot easier than they are on SIM, which is doing precision astrometry in the visible.
This seems to come up every time there's a space telescope article. The moon's not that great a place-- it's not as stable as you think, it's dirty, you get cycled in and out of full sunlight, and you have to land everything softly in a nasty gravity well without any atmosphere to use for braking.
I'm going to have to put in a journal entry or something with why the moon is overrated for space telescopes.
from looking at the sunshades, I'd guess that they plan to put Spirit in an L2 or earth trailing orbit, most likely L2-- it's close enough for high bandwidth communication, and it actually takes slightly less energy to get there than earth trailing.
The other mission they mentioned, SIM, won't do spectroscopy. It's a very high precision interferometer for astrometry-- it will measure positions of stars to a microarcsecond or so. I can't remember the down to earth comparison information, but it will be capable of detecting planets of a few earth masses in their stars' habitable zones around the nearest 250 or so stars. It will also remove the sin(i) ambiguity of the radial velocity measurements of the planets already known. There are also a bunch of other science programs covering stellar astrophysics, and some extragalactic stuff, too.
None of the above, except the warm beverages, but I prefer hot coffee (rather than iced) even when it's 105F out, which isn't unusual here in the summer. They don't seem to put me to sleep.
I'm quite fit, and that actually leads me to prefer it cooler-- I generate a lot of heat. I drink vast quantities of water, only a few cups of coffee during the day. My sitting around (as opposed to resting) pulse is about 60. I really prefer the temperature to be about 68-70F, and I can't wear long sleeves, and prefer to wear shorts.