Planetary Resources To Build Crowdfunded Public Space Telescope 60
kkleiner writes "Planetary Resources, the company that set its sights on mining asteroids, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1M to crowdsource the world's first publicly accessible space telescope. In an interview, co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis stated that the ARKYD 100 telescope is a means of 'extending the optic nerve of humanity.' The company hopes that the campaign, which is supported by Richard Branson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Seth Green, will make an orbiting telescope available to the public to help schools and museums in their educational efforts to inspire great enthusiasm in space."
business meeting? (Score:3, Funny)
> supported by Richard Branson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Seth Green
My imagination can't comprehend what a business meetting or board meeting would be like with these three, but I bet it's awesome!
Re:business meeting? (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, I do have an image in my head.
Bill Nye is on one end of the board room table with bubbling beakers and flasks connected with plastic tubes, Seth Green is on the other end of the table building obscene clay figures of celebrities, and Richard Branson parachutes in through the skylight.
which I believe was some sort of hovercraft... (Score:2)
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Not sure what Bill Nye's cooking up with those beakers and flasks, but I hope it's nothing more complex than Folgers coffee. The guy is a complete idiot when it comes to science and he shows his ass whenever he's brought in as an "expert" by the media.
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Lessee, we've made fun of sponsors Seth Green and Bill Nye. Who's left?
Oooh, Richard Branson! You've started successful companies with more cachet than Apple and earned billions off them. You've nailed more pussy than the average 38 year old neckbeard has downloaded in his mom's basement. La HOOOOOOOZER!!!!!
Billion (Score:2)
duh! (Score:1)
they'll spend a million talking about a space telescope
doesn't have to be Hubble grade (Score:2)
A pint sized space telescope with a 1-2 yr mission could probably be built for $1M. Maybe Brandson will launch it for free.
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They claim to have already designed and built the thing (and have some pictures of a plausible-looking prototype). They just need your hard-earned cash to actually put it into space and build the web portal, [sarcasm]because they forgot about that part in their original budget[/sarcasm]. I feel like the kickstarter page is a publicity stunt instead of a necessary fundraising tool. It's also terribly disingenuous of them to post Hubble images and say "you can take pictures of these" (which most people rea
Re:Billion (Score:5, Insightful)
The telescope itself isn't, in this case, a groundbreaking state-of-the-art super-expensive instrument. It's a reasonably nice 'scope by amateur astronomy standards, and the viewing from space is great --- but the main point of this project is education/outreach. For a million bucks, you can build a lot more capable telescope on earth (including a dark site location); but that might not have the awesomeness factor to eighth-graders as controlling a space telescope for their class project. If you want a space telescope with groundbreaking scientific capabilities that you can't get (at any price) from Earth, you might need $1e9 dollars; but $1e6 (plus a whole lot of free mission/design support that would get counted in the budget of a $1e9 project) seems reasonable for putting an "advanced amateur" telescope in space.
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For a million bucks, you can build a lot more capable telescope on earth but that might not have the awesomeness factor to eighth-graders as controlling a space telescope for their class project.
The direct view through an amateur's optical telescope on the ground is awesome in its own right --- intimate and affordable.
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I personally agree. And, in my opinion, you could spend $1M to put together ~20 really high quality educational astronomy setups, truck them around the country, and bus students out from urban areas to proper viewing sites --- to give a lot more kids some really awesome hands-on work with a nice telescope setup. I think "getting pictures from a space telescope" would be more exciting to kids (at levels not advanced enough to appreciate much more than the "ooh, pretty" factor) than "getting pictures from a m
they crowdfund for themselves mainly (Score:2)
The company at the origin of this tries to leverage crowdfunding (in exchange for some observation time through a 'scope we all agree will be pathetic compared to the same amount spent on ground) because they need many such small 'telescope-sats' to perform their primary goal: detecting asteroids.
There are various ways to perform this from space, but all revolves around having *many* observing microsatellites, the many viewpoints needed to reconstitute asteroid trajectories.
And, for now, they only have *a s
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And to add to that, there already are a number of observatories scattered about which devote some/all of their time to educational and outreach. There aren't any space telescopes dedicated to that purpose.
like shooting sharks in a barrel. with a laser. (Score:3)
Here, you've got to say it this way:
one miiiiiiiilllllliiiiooooonnn dollars!
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Well, I guess its more like "A digicam with tele lens and filter wheel mounted on a cubesat" then "real" telescope
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Public access (Score:2)
I'm having difficulty figuring out exactly how much "public access" we can really get to something that is probably going to be in demand by a lot of people doing a lot more important things than my space-equivalent of a Google Street View tour of places I'm never going and know nothing about.
Re:Public access (Score:4)
They say "public access," not "free access" --- this'll be a pay-to-play "tourist attraction," with some time handed out free* (*paid by donations/grants, or the taxpayer as a tax write-off) for education/outreach. It'll be available "to the public" in the sense that anyone in the public can plop down a couple hundred bucks per snapshot from it (as opposed to needing to write a grant through a research institution). So you won't be getting any "Galactic Street View" time slots on this telescope unless you're willing to pay, which will limit the demand to the available supply.
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You're making a big assumption here, femtobyte. When did I ever say free? My real concern is, how am I to be assured that the "public" won't get priced out of the deal? Especially if grant money intrudes and artificially inflates the market rate for such time. The astronomy "public" is more than a little influenced by government and deep-pocketed corporations, after all.
I, for one... (Score:2)
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... you might be a troll but...
They've always said step 1 was creating all of these small cameras to send into space to look for asteroids. This way they can catalog all the asteroids first and what they're made of. Then they can go get the ones they are interested in. We apparently only know of a fraction of asteroids currently in our solar system and only know what a few of them are made of.
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... you might be a troll but...
They've always said step 1 was creating all of these small cameras to send into space to look for asteroids. This way they can catalog all the asteroids first and what they're made of. Then they can go get the ones they are interested in. We apparently only know of a fraction of asteroids currently in our solar system and only know what a few of them are made of.
Apparently, the device they are kick-starting is a tech demo/prototype of the ones they want to hunt asteroids with. Whether you think of the offer to pay for slices of it as a 'win-win proposition' or 'why am I subsidizing your R&D again?' is up to you.
Really you need our money (Score:1)
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Kickstarter is a slightly awkward fit for some of the uses it has been put to.
For purely charitable purposes, having a 'the cash gets returned, not dumped into a black hole, if the project never gets off the ground' mechanism is really quite sensible. If Project X simply can't be done for less than Y dollars, it's extremely useful to have some way of asking for Y dollars; but freeing each potential contributor from the concern of 'Well, I'd give if I knew it were going somewhere; but if you raise less than
Out of curiosity... (Score:3)
How much of a penalty, relative to the penalties incurred for things like small size, subpar optics, etc. does putting up with the atmosphere impose? (I understand that for certain wavelengths it's basically 100%, but this isn't an extreme UV instrument or anything).
I'm told, by people more closely involved with amateur astronomy than I, that a 200mm aperture is a pretty small instrument, especially for reflector-based designs. How well would you expect it to perform compared to, say, a ~$10,000 device in some reasonably-non-light-polluted rural area(nothing heroic; but not necessarily within spitting distance of a major population center). A $50k? $100k?
Obviously, 'in space' is sort of its own reward; but(because space telescopes have historically been built only when somebody with relatively deep pockets wants to attack a problem that they can't build a ground telescope for), I really don't have a sense of how much advantage 'in space' gets you compared to a much less design constrained piece of hardware that has to look through the atmosphere; but also didn't have to be launched into space.
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Since the popularization of adaptive optics, the atmosphere has become much less of a problem. Before adaptive optics, you were strongly limited in how big a telescope would be useful for resolving power --- even on a perfectly clear night, atmospheric fluctuations would cause different parts of your big telescope aperture to see different areas of the sky, destroying any resolution advantage over smaller scopes (though you at least still got more light for a brighter blurry picture). But now, with adaptive
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Adaptive optics are good for resolution, but don't help with photometric precision. Getting above the atmosphere does absolutely help with that. See Kepler and MOST for good examples of this.
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Their camera works from the near ultraviolet to the near infrared. One reason for using the ultraviolet is that at some point Planetary Resources is going to want to take spectra of sunlight that reflects off an asteroid in order to get detailed information about the composition of the asteroid. Having access to the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum will be a big help for this. I am impressed with what I have seen of the ARKYD telescopes. Assuming that the specs on their Web site are correct (and why
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Here's Saturn [eso.org] as seen by ESO's Very Large Telescope [eso.org] in Chile (8.2m mirror, though it can combine 4 of them into an interferometer). The observatory is at 2635m above sea level, so is looking through about 70% of the air you'd be seeing through at sea level (air decreases in density with altitude, so there is diminishing returns for getting up high). The obs
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OK, so the fact that I can get a pretty good image of Saturn and a couple of it's moons with my 130mm parabolic short tube from my driveway in a light-soaked neighborhood in a washed out sky means I should actually be pretty damn happy. I'd like to step up to a 10" - 12" OTA but the GEM is stupidly expensive and I have little love for a Dob (imaging is my goal but man, what a budget you have to have...)
Thanks for the pics.
Pocket Change (Score:1)
Couldn't Branson just kick in the $1M out of pocket change?
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Couldn't Branson just kick in the $1M out of pocket change?
I'm pretty sure that you don't get to the position where you can do that by doing that if you could get somebody else to do it instead...
Newfangled Tangulated Cotton-picking... (Score:1)
Anybody else read that as "confounded" telescope?
Then again (Score:2)
A similar kickstarter telescope project: (Score:2)
Ok, it's not in space, and it's not actually kickstarter. But pretty cool none the less.
http://www.cincinnatiobservatory.org/history.html [cincinnati...vatory.org]
This is great. (Score:2)
This is a good start towards something new. I been thinking of something like this for a mars rover.
All I see is people complaining why can't the reach people do it themselves.
Well my response to that is, maybe they want to stay rich. Because if your not rich in this country you are a godamn slave.
But that does not lessen the fact that this is the right step towards doing off planet exploration without the government muddling things up. Opening it up to everyone not just the elite top graduates of select un