hoom
Veteran
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.
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.
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