New big telescopes

[hoom]

So a couple of months back was announcement of the chosen location for the European Extremely Large Telescope.

This really astounded me for its massive scale & got me thinking that combined with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope and Square Kilometer Array radio telescope project, I think we're in for some pretty amazing observations & possibly some re-writing of physics once these are online somewhere around 2020

EELT is a 42m diameter primary mirror! (current biggest is 10.4m GTC)
Apparently this is a down-scale from originally planned 100m Overwhelmingly Large Telescope that was going to be too expensive/technically difficult.
Amazingly on looking up the EELT it seems there are actually several similar size projects in the works too.

It seems that depending a bit on who you believe ~40m (or ~80m) is going to give sufficient resolution to be doing spectroscopy on the atmosphere of some extra-solar planets & work out their composition.

I haven't paid all that much attention to the Obama NASA policy change but my understanding is that the JWST had been looking pretty dicey under Bushes 'Drop everything else & go to the moon' policy but is definitely on solid ground now.
Its a 6.5m telescope (vs 2.4m on Hubble) that will be put out at the Sun-Earth L2 point.
That is out well past the moon so that the Earth, Moon & Sun are permanently in the same relatively small part of the sky which should enable very long continuous exposures that are impossible for Hubble in LEO.
Unfortunately being that far out, there can be no servicing missions if anything goes bad/to extend the mission but the gains should far out-weigh that down side.

The Square Kilometer Array is so big they are talking about observing back to 300,000 years after the Big Bang
Also we're going to get some of them here in NZ if Aus wins the project
Recently they started piping data from the currently biggest NZ Radio Telescope over to Aus via the internet instead of by tapes in a plane, part of the build up to the Aus bid.

 

[nutball]

Take a look at the LSST and what they're doing. Physically it's nowhere near as large as E-ELT, but it's a completely different design that gives a (relatively) massive field-of-view. LSST is designed as a sky-survey telescope rather than the more traditional point-at-a-few-interesting-targets type.

What stands out is the amount of data it'll generate - of order a few PB per year. That's just the raw imagery, the resulting lists of point sources and so on derived from processing these will add up to ~10^12 database rows after a few years. Making sense of all of that is going to be a massive challenge. LSST is as impressive in data-mining terms as E-ELT is in engineering terms.

 

[Grall]

I haven't paid all that much attention to the Obama NASA policy change but my understanding is that the JWST had been looking pretty dicey under Bushes 'Drop everything else & go to the moon' policy but is definitely on solid ground now.

Hey, why not kill 2 birds with 1 stone: go to the moon and put up an 80 meter dia. telescope there!

Benefits: no air to distort the images and low gravity which won't stress the telescope structure.

Of course, there's a few wee technical stumbling blocks to overcome as well before we can actually accomplish that...such as how to build a permanent lunar outpost... (And a few economic stumbling blocks as well, lol.)

Anyway, stuff like this is so cool. Huge telescopes are really interesting. Only problem is they take so long to build (and cost so much money... )

 

[dizietsma]

Take a look at the LSST and what they're doing. Physically it's nowhere near as large as E-ELT, but it's a completely different design that gives a (relatively) massive field-of-view. LSST is designed as a sky-survey telescope rather than the more traditional point-at-a-few-interesting-targets type.

What stands out is the amount of data it'll generate - of order a few PB per year. That's just the raw imagery, the resulting lists of point sources and so on derived from processing these will add up to ~10^12 database rows after a few years. Making sense of all of that is going to be a massive challenge. LSST is as impressive in data-mining terms as E-ELT is in engineering terms.

"A large aperture, wide field survey telescope and 3200 Megapixel camera to image faint astronomical objects across the sky."

Golly.

 

[findhorn_elves]

It's good for spying your neighbors also hehehe...

 

[WhiningKhan]

What stands out is the amount of data it'll generate - of order a few PB per year. That's just the raw imagery, the resulting lists of point sources and so on derived from processing these will add up to ~10^12 database rows after a few years. Making sense of all of that is going to be a massive challenge. LSST is as impressive in data-mining terms as E-ELT is in engineering terms.

Pfft, all this will be mostly useful for depth extension of Google Earth's sky view anyway. Just apply 99.99% JPG compression to the images, pass the data to Google and let people search for human faces from nebula photos.

The E.T.'s get another excuse for destroying the humanity - Google distributing nude shots of aliens tanning their tentacles in the backyard.

 

[NRP]

This is definitely exciting stuff. I've always been fascinated by astronomy.

 

[hoom]

Take a look at the LSST and what they're doing. Physically it's nowhere near as large as E-ELT, but it's a completely different design that gives a (relatively) massive field-of-view. LSST is designed as a sky-survey telescope rather than the more traditional point-at-a-few-interesting-targets type.

Wow, 8.4m is hardly small by modern standards even if it'll be dwarfed by the 42m one.
An 8.4m scan of the visible sky every 3 days should give some pretty impressive results