The extremely large telescope will transform astronomy
economist.com
economist.com
Edit: come to think of it, mirrors are probably safe right? The birds will stop to avoid flying into the other bird.
'this thing is giant (you wont believe what happens next)'
'nobody expected it to be this big (you have to see it)'
'mr beast trapped in HERE for 8 weeks (cant plant any trees)'
No, we can't stop just yet as they are – conceivably – other models that will eventually surpass the «Inconceivably Large Telescope»:
– «Penultimately Inconceivably Large Telescope»
– «Antepenultimately Inconceivably Large Telescope»
– «Preantepenultimately Inconceivably Large Telescope».
A strings of further upgrades is also likely as a series of «Inconceivably Ultra Large» and «Pre/ante/penultimately Inconceivably Ultra Large» telescopes.
I guess astronomers, like programmers, are just bad at naming things.
When they are not using boring names like that, the astro world does have some great names. It lets us know humans were involved in the naming. From the acronyms to the super superlative names, they have a bit of personality to them.
(I let you guess, but that's a close cousin of the BFG)
Same with TFA. The Fine Article.
Customer: "I'd like a pound of broccoli, please."
Grocer: "I'm out of broccoli."
... repeat 1 or two times
Grocer: "How do you spell broccoli?"
Customer: "B-R-O-C-C-O-L-I."
Grocer: "You left out the 'F'."
Customer: "There's no 'F' in broccoli!"
Grocer: "That's what I'm trying to tell you!"
Though maybe there's some kind of strong enough diminishing effect on emphasis value such that any number of "terribly"s still has bounded effect XD
Look at Windows NT, for example: NT stands for "new technology". Well it obviously isn't new any more.
Books are an understandable phenomenon. They were supposed to disappear before the stuff they describe stops being valid. But we have a nasty tendency of naming permanent things "modern".
But anyway, it reminds me on how if you want a real textbook that covers a math or physics subject with all the details, you need to get the one named "fundamentals of X". If you go and get the "advanced X", it has a superficial and incomplete description that won't help you with anything.
Are you hosting a tor exit node? Even that shouldn’t be enough. Are you part of a botnet? I mean if you were controlling a botnet you wouldn’t get blocked. You’d have to be skating that fine line of mostly innocent but also bad.
Search for this text to see pics
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With Starship and ..... SLS...... anyway.... coming online I'm extremely excited at the prospects of reusing JWST concepts/tech on larger arrays or larger single mirrors. A whole new upper limit of space telescopes unlocked.
Yet, if you ask 100 people, both scientists and laypeople, mabye 99 will tell you that the $10 billion bill for JWST was worth it.
I'm pro-science, but scientists refuse to even ask this question: when you ask for billions for a super-duper experiment (ITER, looking at you, post-CERN collider too), what is the chance that you could get the same experiment 30 years from now for 100 times less money? The Human Genome Project cost $2.7 million in the 90's, yet now one can sequence any genome for hundreds of dollars (if not less).
At what point will scientists be willing to say that maybe the price for the JWST was too high?
They'd correctly point out spending the money inventing the technology is precisely how it gets that cheap 30 years later.
> At what point will scientists be willing to say that maybe the price for the JWST was too high?
For context, the JWST cost us about as much as Americans spend on one Halloween. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/much-americans-spend-hallowee...
That's a cute argument, but flawed.
For any project, scientific or not, you need to estimate the return on investment and to survey the alternatives. With your argument it appears you can skip these things. If a project costs less than how much Americans spend on Halloween, then we just do it?
By the way, for a lot of people Halloween is quite important. It must be, since they are willing to part with their money. But that's a choice each of them is free to make.
Spending $10 billion on a science project that discovers some distant galaxies is a choice made by other people on their behalf. And when this happens it is the duty of those people to ask and answer some questions.
Using your argument, it follows that the people who make that choice do not actually need to ask and answer the pertinent questions. Because, you know, science is always worth it.
> They'd correctly point out spending the money inventing the technology is precisely how it gets that cheap 30 years later.
They would certainly point that out, but incorrectly. In the case of JWST, none of the money spent on it resulted in technologies used by SpaceX to build the Starship.
Sure; the Human Genome Project didn't help develop electric cars, either.
JWST benefits the construction of future telescopes Starship may carry. Deployable sunshades and unfolding spacecraft will still be useful in Starship's larger payload sizes, as will the advances in optics etc.
Again, the fundamental logical error you're making is that waiting 30 years will make technologies just... drop into our laps, fully formed. You mentioned ITER, for example, and implied we'd somehow just magically have cheap fusion power in a few decades without that sort of investment in research and development.
Any of them whose project was not funded because the money was tied up in funding JWST?
The cheapest big telescopes I could find with a quick trawl are the Hobby–Eberly Telescope and its "clone" the SALT. They cost about $20 million each, compared to similarly-sized telescopes in the $80 million-and-up price range.
I doubt there's a project time-line since the 1970s from inception to first light of under 5 years, which would put us at 2029 already.
Perhaps the aim should be to have lots of "good enough" unit instruments, rather than one world-beatingly big one that politicians or billionaires find stimulating to throw money at.
The Keck Telescope was the first major observatory to use this technique in 1993.
With regard to optical light space telescopes, one iteration of a single large mirror would be a great advancement. Hubble is only 2.4m. Back when NASA was developing Ares V there were proposals for an 8m optical space telescope. You can still find vestiges of that at NASA[1] and various videos of the launch and deployment.
Maybe that can still happen with Starship, SLS or whatever. Just need a big enough payload fairing.
I mean, shipping an origami of light and bendy material should be easier than making an origami of super delicate mirrors that have to be micrometers tolerances and be cooled to few K to operate.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2014_phase_i... Figure 17
I worry a bit the cost of something like this may be better spent on other space exploration efforts which will yield more knowledge.
For instance, voyager 3?
As far as astonishing tech goes, Webb charts hard.