Fourth and Final 'Great Observatory' To Launch Soon

Uosdwis writes "The New York Times (FRYYY) has an article about SIRTF, the fourth and last 'Great Observatory'. It is a Space based Infra Red Telescope Facility which will extend the work of The Hubble telescope, The Compton Gamma Ray telescope and The Chandra X-Ray telescope. SIRTF is quite an amazing project using new ideas such as an Earth Trailing starting from an L1 orbit, and cooling only the intruments. Saved tax payers over $1 billion in redesigns. Check it out!"

archive.nytimes.com

[breon.halling]

Here's the article [nytimes.com] -- no registration needed.

If you ever need to check a NYTimes article, replace "www.nytimes.com" with "archive.nytimes.com" in the URL.

There are four?

[sketerpot]

I really had no idea that there were four of these Great Observatories, since the only one I've ever heard about is the Hubble telescope. Perhaps radio telescopes and other things outside of the visible spectrum don't sound as exciting.

I like the idea of space telescopes---but I also like the idea of better earth based telescopes, since I think that they're going to be the most practical until we get a space elevator or something. We can make stars stop shimmering with adaptive optics, and we can get the resolving power of a telescope with a mirror a mile wide with interferometry, which would be impractical to build in space. Long vacuum-filled pipes between telescopes and mirrors aligning the light waves to be in phase are, to me, just as exciting as a single "great observatory"; moreso, perhaps, since the interferometric observatories can be constructed more cheaply (and so it will be easier for astronomers to get time on them).

Re:There are four?

[barakn]

Interferometers in space will experience less noise than down here and can be made much larger. In particular, instruments for gravity wave detection like LISA [nasa.gov], which will be 5 million km on a side. And the other 2 are great observatories are the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. You never wanted X-ray glasses?

Not the LAST

[HyPeR_aCtIvE]

The writing of the slashdot article makes it sound like this is the LAST Great Observatory that NASA is doing, and then is closing it's doors on that subject. Not so. It happens to be the last of the original 4 proposed ones in the 1970's. But others will come and go. For example, the planned 'replacement' for Hubble. Known as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), formerly known as the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST). Find out whatever you wish to know about it at: http://jwstsite.stsci.edu/ [stsci.edu]

Re:Not the LAST

[Anonymous Coward]

This *is* the last 'Great Observatory' and it is closing the doors on the project which created these four telescopes. The article didn't say NASA was not going to make telescopes anymore, just the project was ending. JWST is a telescope, and it could be great, but it was not proposed under the 'GO' project, it was it's own singular project(won by TRW & Ball Aerospace.) The 'GO' projects are the first to choose these parts of the EM spectrum, JWST will produce more science from newer tech but it us

Re:Not the LAST

[remou]

beyond moon orbit for the JWST???

Which probably means neither repair nor
upgrade possibilities like with hubble...

a sunshield the size of a tennis court???

good thing there's less space trash in that
far off orbit...:-)