NASA Considers Sending Telescope To the Outer Solar System 152
Nancy_A writes "A mission that astronomers and cosmologists have only dreamed about — until now. A team at JPL and Caltech has been looking into the possibility of hitching an optical telescope to a survey spacecraft on a mission to the outer solar system. Light pollution in our inner solar system, from both the nearby glow of the Sun and the hazy zodiacal glow from dust ground up in the asteroid belt, has long stymied cosmologists looking for a clearer take on the early Universe."
Upwards? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why couldn't they just send one upwards out of the plane of the solar system? Wouldn't that be quicker?
Earth's orbit and slingshots (Score:5, Informative)
Why couldn't they just send one upwards out of the plane of the solar system? Wouldn't that be quicker?
Costs. And time.
We already have a certain velocity in the plane (earth is going around the sun, and we have to escape the sun's gravity well). We have practically zero velocity in the upwards direction. This is also who rockets are launched from near the equator.
Add to that possible slingshots around other planets, and you have your whole answer.
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But the relative velocity of the rocket, relative to Earth, is zero at liftoff, so our velocity relative the solar system's plane is not a factor that affects the rocket.
The slingshot around other planets can also happen in a perpendicular direction relative to our plane.
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If you want to get away from the Solar system, then ultimately the velocity relative to the sun is what matters.
True, you first need to get off the earth. And the speed relatively to the earth matters. But as you reach the right speed (11 km/s), soon enough the velocity relative to the sun starts to matter more. And then it was nice if our rocket took off in the direction of the motion of the earth, using all the earth's forward motion as a bonus.
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Where's the edit button? Sorry about the all italics.
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F12 : Console : $('.btn.link[id*="reply"]').text('Edit');
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If there was an edit button, you could make an incredibly stupid remark, then change it making all the people who responded look like fools. Or you could make a good comment, and after it's moderated +5 you could change it to a GNAA Goatse troll. It would open up all sorts of trollery, and would be a very bad thing indeed.
That's what the preview button is for -- so you can edit.
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On the other hand, the velocity of the rocket, relative to the Sun, is high at liftoff. And velocity relative to the Sun is the primary factor in determining the orbit, relative to the Sun, that a deep-space probe takes.
To provide some numbers, starting from LEO, a deltaV of around 6300 m/s would be about enough to get us to Jupiter using
Re:Upwards? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You could use the last gravity assist to deflect upwards, but what would be the point? If you've already used a few planetary passes working to build up significant velocity in one direction, why waste your last opportunity by adding velocity in a whole other direction? Most likely you're already past the asteroid belt by that point, and it won't help you get away from the sun's glare any quicker.
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It helps if you intend to overfly the poles of say, the Sun (Ulysses)...
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Re:Upwards? (Score:5, Informative)
Not necessarily. [wikipedia.org]
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Ah, so you can exchange momentum with the planet in a great many ways. Delightful! I fucking love physics.
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The orbit would require that the telescope go through the plane of the solar system twice each orbit, which if it is close to the sun would mean going through the dust.
The only way to beat this is to go a far away, which as other posters have said, is easier slong the plane of the solar system.
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In addition to the points others have made, they want to be far from the sun so that it's not a significant contaminant. Whether you go out of the plane or stay in the plane you'll need to get to the same distance to do that. Also, they want to avoid the Zodiacal dust. Going a short way out of the plane means that the dust (and the sun) will be blocking large amounts of an entire hemisphere.
Also, probes going out to the outer reaches of the solar system can use gravitational slingshots to get extra speed. G
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On the other hand, if you're pointed away from the sun, without any significant dust in the way to reflect back the sun's light, I don't see how the sun would contaminate anything. I'm probably missing something...
Re:Upwards? (Score:4, Informative)
No, you're not, you're totally right - if you're pointing away from the sun then it doesn't contaminate anything. It depends where they're pointing it and what they're observing for whether it's an issue. You can mask out the sun but it will still be blocking a part of the sky - and more of it the nearer you are (obviously), and if you're any distance from it at all it will be many years before it gets out of the way.
The dust is probably more a problem though, I agree.
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I like the way you think.
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Why couldn't they just send one upwards out of the plane of the solar system? Wouldn't that be quicker?
Because it would be whooshing through dust particles that orbit along the plane twice in its orbit, and it will get bashed up pretty quick.
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Why couldn't they just send one upwards out of the plane of the solar system? Wouldn't that be quicker?
The reason why is in the summary.
...Light pollution in our inner solar system...
If they were to go "upwards" they still have the light pollution. By going to the edge of our solar system, you got a lot of crap between you and the closets star (the sun), plus your farther away, which should give clearer pictures/images/whatevers.
I am, of course, a stoner and not some brainiac, but this answer i give seems like common sense to me. I could of course, be wrong, and if I am, then I learn something new. If i'm not, then woot! go common sense!
Re:Upwards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. The radiation envelope of the solar system is much wider than it is tall. The majority of light-blocking dust is in the plane. So going upwards would get you a clearer view much quicker than going all the way out to the edge along the plane.
Re:Upwards? (Score:5, Insightful)
But there are no survey craft headed in that direction. This sounds like they want to piggyback off some other project.
Plus, you may be able to gather significant radial velocity due to planetary orbits and gravitational slingshots, while acquiring velocity perpendicular to the orbital plane may mainly rely on thrusters, which would be expensive.
Main point being: time is not the problem, expense (in US$) is.
Re:Upwards? (Score:5, Funny)
But there are no survey craft headed in that direction.
When the Zorblaxians invade, it will be because NASA was too lazy to go up or down instead of sideways.
Congratulations! (Score:5, Funny)
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That's incredibly [slashdot.org] easy to do. [slashdot.org]
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I would love to lay claim to the word, but has sprung from the mind of Zach Weiner [smbc-comics.com], one of the most unfortunately named webcomic artists in the world.
Zorblaxians are SMBC's stock "green aliens with black eyes and a big head" species.
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Except for Ulysses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft) [wikipedia.org]
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That's true but then you can do both, hitch a ride on a survey craft to say Jupiter & Saturn, then when passing Saturn use it's gravity well to slingshot the craft - with telescope attach in a perpendicular direction.
Thinking about it, the Voyager's are in such a trajectory, both leaving the solar system away from the plane containing the planets.
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/images/interstellar_1.gif [nasa.gov]
Re:Upwards? (Score:5, Insightful)
That means that one requires at least two such collisions/stages to pick up momentum perpendicular to the ecliptic. The first has to do one or more classic slingshots in the plane of the ecliptic to pick up linear momentum. The second has to "collide" with a planet's gravitational well in such a way as to deflect the momentum up or down out of the ecliptic. Sadly, because gravitation is a radial force and conserves angular momentum (in the approximately inertial frame of the collision), one cannot combine the two in a single collision any way I can think of -- you can only pick up slingshot momentum in the plane in a single pass; one cannot also deflect it up.
Voyager (IIRC) did just this sort of things -- engaged in multiple slingshots as it went along both to pick up momentum and energy and to alter direction of that momentum "for free" by selecting specific impact parameters and collision planes with its targets.
But this doesn't make this a bad idea, only a more complicated one than "just" a slingshot off of e.g. the moon. The other nifty thing they could probably manage with such a craft is doing some serious parallax measurements, ones with a baseline much larger than 2 AU. Put a really precise observatory in an orbit out at (say) 20 AU and you extend our ability to measure distances to nearby stars out by a factor of 10 -- 1000 times as many stars, probably even more if getting out of the haze reveals e.g. nearby brown dwarfs and stellar objects that are too faint to see. This in turn could alter things like estimates of the total mass or mass distribution of the galaxy if the numbers turn out to be very different from what we think they are now. So it isn't only a matter of the distant Universe -- the near Universe could benefit from this sort of out-of-ecliptic study, although it is long term science, since the further out you make the orbit, the longer you have to wait for a full parallax baseline.
rgb
Re:Upwards? (Score:5, Informative)
Not to be picky, but I don't believe gravitational slingshots work that way. They are basically elastic collisions (mediated by gravity) with a planet, and therefore only give you an increase in velocity if you "recoil" in the direction of motion of the planet. In a nutshell, you borrow a tiny bit of a planet's or moon's forward momentum to come out travelling at twice its speed relative to the Sun.
Yes, they can do that. It is essentially an elastic collision as you say, but it doesn't have to result in the gained momentum being in the same direction as the planet's motion. Extrapolating your analogy, if you had an elastic collision between the probe and a high-latitude region of the planet (rather than at the equator) then your resulting trajectory would have a 'vertical' (meaning perpendicular to the ecliptic) component. This can be done by having your encounter with the planet you are using to gain the gravitational assist happen at a high inclination. Take a look at Voyager 2. From a quick wiki search, it's currently travelling on a trajectory 30 below the ecliptic after it's encounter with Neptune and Triton.
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Momentum is a vector quantity, so you do have to worry about direction. The gained momentum doesn't have to be in the planet's current direction of motion, but you'll have to make the exchange such that the momenta of the spacecraft and planet change in opposite directions.
The relevant quantity here is really _angular_ momentum, since we're talking about orbits. Any spacecraft launched from Earth will start with the Earth's angular momentum resulting from its orbit around the Sun. So the angular momentum
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Yes I meant to say (at least I was thinking) the last slingshot wouldn't need to gain momentum, just change the trajectory - the momentum being gained from any previous encounters.
If this is a telescope then you don't necessarily want extra momentum just a change in trajectory out of the plane of the ecliptic - although the timescales involved even this wouldn't add to much when you think how far both Voyagers have got since they were launched. Even they are power starved now so any telescope out there woul
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Not to be picky, but I don't believe gravitational slingshots work that way.
They do work that way. It's been done. [wikipedia.org]
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Someone better tell NASA since they did it already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist#The_Ulysses_probe_changed_the_plane_of_its_trajectory [wikipedia.org]
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This sounds like they want to piggyback off some other project.
Makes me wonder how big this thing is going to be. Presumably not Hubble sized because the mass has to be shared with the main survey craft.
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while acquiring velocity perpendicular to the orbital plane may mainly rely on thrusters, which would be expensive.
Again, no. You can slingshot by approaching the southern hemisphere of a planet, and be catapulted perpendicularily to the ecliptic, exiting from the northen hemisphere of the catapulting planet - it makes no difference.
There might be a miniscule gravitational pull towards the plane, but that's nothing compared to the one originating from its main contributor, the Sun.
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Re:Upwards? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but it's possibly worth bearing in mind that the telescope leaves earth with significant velocity in the plane, at a tangent to Earth's orbit. To send it "up" (i.e., at a normal to the Earth's orbital plane) you would need to shed that significant velocity, and even then it would be just going "up" in a straight line; it wouldn't be in an orbit around the sun or anything.
Of course, for getting "a clearer view much quicker" such a trajectory may be sufficient, but I'd be interested if anyone knowledgeable could comment on the practicalities of sending something in that direction with a sufficiently useful velocity (whether sufficiently useful means to escape the sun's gravity well, or merely to reach a useful "height" fast enough, and stay there long enough before being dragged back in towards the sun).
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That would be the traded velocity component. You trade speed for direction using a planetary gravity well as intermediary and you end up in a nice solar orbit at a high inclination.
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whether sufficiently useful means to escape the sun's gravity well
You can't do that without a gravitational slingshot, our engines are not strong enough to reach escape velocity by themselves.
or merely to reach a useful "height" fast enough, and stay there long enough before being dragged back in towards the sun
The problem is that the more elliptical your orbit is, the more energy it needs to get it there, so at the end of the day it might not worth it.
But the biggest problem with this in my opinion is that orbits that are not in the ecliptic are unstable because of the planets' gravity.
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going upwards would get you a clearer view much quicker than going all the way out to the edge along the plane.
Yes, but you wouldn't be able to use any planetary slingshot maneuvers along the way to gain speed...
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IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist) but from what little I do not getting into a solar polar orbit is extremely difficult. To date only one probe I know of has done this - Ulysses. And to do it required a Jupiter gravity assist to get it there. Besides, getting into a polar orbit will not reduce the glare of the sun. Finally, it will probably take less propellant to exit the solar system than take a grav slingshot into solar polar orbit.
Now if you can get really far out (400 - 500 AU) you can use the su
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IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist) but from what little I do not getting into a solar polar orbit is extremely difficult. To date only one probe I know of has done this - Ulysses. And to do it required a Jupiter gravity assist to get it there. Besides, getting into a polar orbit will not reduce the glare of the sun. Finally, it will probably take less propellant to exit the solar system than take a grav slingshot into solar polar orbit.
It's actually not hard (Ulysses slingshot on Jupiter wasn't all that special) it's just that it's rather uncommon since unless you're looking at the sun (or outwards), there's not much to look at outside the ecliptic.
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The same dust in the asteroid belt that blurs images from today's telescopes would decrease light pollution from the sun.
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Exactly. The radiation envelope of the solar system is much wider than it is tall.
No, you are wrong. You are probably correct on the dust, but not on the radiation envelope: the Solar Wind is much more powerful in its polar emissions than its equatorial ones.
Re:Xena (Score:4, Informative)
Xena was just a temporary suggestion for the name; since 13th September 2006 it's actually been called Eris [wikipedia.org].
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Xena was just a temporary suggestion for the name; since 13th September 2006 it's actually been called Eris [wikipedia.org].
and what are eris and dysnomia (its moon) if not lawless?
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Interesting, I'd only heard that called "aphasia". Sounds like one meaning of "dysnomia" is from Latin, the other Greek.
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To me they will always be Xena and Gabrielle. But then, I still call Pluto a planet. Fuck you, IAU!
Bandwidth make it improbable? (Score:5, Insightful)
So... super-high resolution images at maybe one per day?
Maybe I have that wrong, but I don't think so. Higher-frequency (and therefore higher bandwidth) signals tend to attenuate more rapidly than lower-frequency signals do.
Re:Bandwidth make it improbable? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe the smart thing to do is have the 'scope do the data processing for us. In astronomy there's a lot of preprocessing from a large volume of redundant data to a small volume of high-value data, why not have a telescope that's got the intelligence (constantly updated and amended from Earth) to do some of that work before transmission.
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The solar system is mostly empty, what would attenuate the signal? The signal would have to pass through the dust causing the aforementioned zodiacal light, but I'm guessing that would not be enough to be a significant problem.
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A bit better, but not by a huge margin.
Laser loses coherence with distance, and becomes like any other form of light. The distance it can travel is related to the size of the ressonant chamber, and thus with its weight.
Re:Bandwidth make it improbable? (Score:4, Informative)
Distance is the main factor. By the time you're far enough away, you need really big antennas (the Deep Space Network) of which there aren't many; you don't want to keep one of the few DSN antennas pointed at this probe 24/7.
On the transmitter side, the power and size/weight budgets limit the signal strength.
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The probe is only supposed to be sent out as far as Jupiter. That's pretty far, but NASA communicates with probes further out then that all the time.
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It's called "Free Space Loss" Even with a directional antenna, your signal is still subject to the inverse square law. As such, even though there isn't actually atennuation of any kind in a free space, your signal still drops markedly over a long distance. Between the surface of the earth and a satellite in geo-synchronous orbit (such as the DirecTV satellites, which is a hell of a lot of bandwidth) there is about 220dB of free-space loss. This isn't caused by atmospherics, it's just the drop-off due to d
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hmmm... (Score:2)
...far side of Pluto? There was a drama-docu sci-fi thing made by the BBC ("Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets" I think it was called) where part of the Grand Manned Tour was to install an optical array on Pluto. Shockingly good idea, I wonder why this hasn't been done yet (apart from the obvious being cost and how to remotely soft land not just one but a series of probes carrying precision optical instruments on a rock six billion miles away *and* get them synchronised *and* hope that the journey hasn't
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WE could have though. the Apollo program system was designed before the first launch, the orbital stuff was just making sure we did not end up killing astronauts on the first try and horrifying all of america. we could have easily landed on the moon with apollo 1, no testing, just go.
everything from apollo 1 to 11 was safety testing.
Nah (Score:2)
we could have easily landed on the moon with Apollo 1, no testing, just go.
Although development of the LEM wasn't ready until Apollo 5 [wikipedia.org] (22 January 1968). The LEM was on the critical path for the Apollo program.
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And Apollo I isn't really a good example. I had nightmares about that when I was a kid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_1_fire.jpg [wikipedia.org]
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Yeah. My dad came home shattered, like his own parents had died. Stared at the walls.
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As we learned from the shuttle disasters the American public simply doesn't have the stomach for killing astronauts which is why i wouldn't be surprised if China or India are the next ones out there...
I've always thought this was the best argument for non-governmental space exploration and exploitation. If the American public has lost its balls, fuck 'em -- the pussies can butt out. Let those who are willing to take the risks, the ones with the right stuff, reap the rewards.
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And again, looking at history, the expeditions to the north poll that were funded by government had a much higher failure rate than those funded by private enterprise.
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would be to build one on the dark side of the moon
There is no "dark side" of the moon. The side that faces away from Earth is illuminated by the Sun just as often as the side facing Earth.
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until the Russians took photographs of it, it was known as the Dark Side. Orbital mechanics be damned.
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There's no good reason to put such a telescope on anything.
Sure if you want to go smalltime (Score:2)
I mean, if you really want to rock some low light pollution just send it out of the galaxy.
Of course it'll take a few thousand years to get the data back from each picture, but what's a thousand years when you're looking at the beginning of the universe right?
pilot (Score:2, Funny)
I have an ex-wife I'd like to nominate to drive it.
Just tell her there's a Nordstrom's out there.
IT saddens me... (Score:3)
That we blow more money on a pointless war and other bullshit like bailing out the rich and the banks than doing real science and things that benefit all of mankind.
IF we were able to put a hubble telescope out around mars or even further out where it's a lot colder, we could really take advantage of things.
Instead we blow more than the entire NASA budge air conditioning tents for a war in a god forsaken land that will end up with another dictator within 10 years anyways.
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Instead we blow more than the entire NASA budge air conditioning tents for a war in a god forsaken land
There's plenty of room for debate, but many people believe that without protecting its own interests, the US would risk becoming one of those god forsaken lands. The risk might be small but nobody wants to take that chance.
Send it farther, look at NEW Kepler targets! (Score:2)
News flash: NASA will announce something new (presumably more results) from the Kepler planet hunting spacecraft today.
Back to my post: if you can get it to about (I think) 500 AU, it gets to the focal point of the Sun's gravitational lens. The Sun then becomes a GIANT (as in millions of kilometers across) lens, allowing you to see at unbelievable resolutions even at distances of light years. I read somewhere it was at meters(?!) per light year, I can't believe that is true but even at KILOmeters per ligh
Strap a booster rocket onto Hubble (Score:2)
Rather than let the crowning achievement of orbital optics burn up in the atmosphere, why not boost its orbit out of earth's neighborhood. Kick it up to a LaGrange point, or even further. Even if it floats in space until it runs out of batteries, it's still better than ending up as a ball of flaming metal in the upper atmosphere. And next century when spaceflight is commoditized, someone can salvage it and bring it back for a museum piece.
The Mars rovers have shown that useful science can be done far bey
It's not about high-res piccies (Score:3)
If you read the article, it's clear that this is intended to be an instrument which includes a very wide-field imager (3cm aperture) and a somewhat higher-spatial resolution (although that's only in a relative sense) channel with a 15cm aperture, both to operate in the optical/near-infrared. This is not about high spatial resolution imaging of the HST/JWST kind.
The aim is to detect the very faint extragalactic background light (EBL), which includes a component due to the integrated light from the first generation of galaxies in the Universe. Since the zodiacal light of the solar system drowns out that light, getting out beyond 5AU and thus beyond most of the asteroids which yield the dust which in turn reflect sunlight / emit their own IR flux, makes your telescope much more sensitive.
I would have said that this is just YAJS or Yet Another JPL Study, of which we've had several appear in these pages of late. If you want studies, I can give you loads of them: doesn't mean they're going to happen. And yet this one involves Chas Beichman and he knows what he's up to. It also very deliberately name checks the ESA JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) mission as a possible carrier for the proposed instrument package. OK, JUICE is also just a study at the moment, but within six months time, there's a 1-in-3 chance that it'll win the competition to be ESA's next L-class mission and thus much more "real".
Then again, given that JUICE's destination is the Jupiter system (duh), an EBL experiment would be limited to the cruise stage part en-route to 5AU.
Either way, a title of "NASA Considers Sending Telescope to the Outer Solar System" is pretty misleading: this is a study for an instrument package with a couple of cameras, photometers, and spectrometers which might hitchhike on another satellite; it scarcely qualifies as a "telescope" in the same sense as HST, Spitzer, Herschel, JWST, etc.
NASA has had to cancel many probes (Score:3)
Ditto the Hubble telescope. It had a rocky start with the Challenger accident and mis-ground lens. But with a lot of jury-rigging t has been more successful, and costly, than most had anticipated. But its successor the Webb telescope is already triple budget and five years delayed. It came within a hairbreadth of being cancelled twice this year.
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"There will already be stuff 10x better here. Just because one war is over doesn't mean it's time to start spending like fools again."
Again? They never stopped! Their much-ballyhooed "cuts" are nothing but smaller increases than they had planned. The expected expenditures for 2012 and 2013 are LARGER than for 2011. And 2011 was a bad year, indeed.
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Re:Um, will they get funding for it? (Score:5, Funny)
The reign of a great empire has come to an end. I think we'll dive into a quasi modern dark ages for the next period. With the collapse of the world economy wars will break out even more one even might consider WW3. The U.S.A. became unimaginable rich and prosperous with cheap borrowed energy (fossil fuel) and later borrowed money. With this they could achieve things which were awesome and great. Alas with great effort too they destroyed the pillars of their own success and the U.S.A has now become a hollow shell of what they've once been. The world has to stabilize again first before we're going to see great and whole hearty efforts in space again. And with powers shifting don't be surprised if some country else will take the lead. At least IMHO.
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Sounds fairly plausible and bleak to me.
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Sometimes moderators feel a bit funny. I use to mod all of Bruce Parens posts funny just to keep him wondering.
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JWST is actually now funded. The money wound up coming out of agriculture for some reason. Given how long JWST has been on the drawing board they'll want to start considering future space telescopes now if they want them to be in operation in three decades.
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. . . an application for . . . faster-than-light neutrinos . . . ?
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I'm all for putting a neutrino detector at deep space. Must be easy as those things are just a few hundred meters wide.
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I was ready to take the piss out of your post but actually for things like supernova observation, matching up gravity wave events to x-ray bursts, etc. it's good to have a quick reaction time on any instrument with a narrow field of view.
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I'll take the piss out then. The target of this scope isn't supernovas, or anything that requires quick reaction time. It is meant to observe the pervasive background radiation from the early universe.
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Ah, right. For a survey probe it's not an issue then.
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NASA has been communicating with remote probes for decades. What is so different about this one?
Re:not a good idea with current technology (Score:5, Informative)
Well then it's a good thing they're only hoping to go as far as Jupiter, where "the zodiacal light is 30 times fainter than at Earth". But don't take my word for it, try reading the article.
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But don't take my word for it, try reading the article.
Heretic!
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Moot if the is a return on investment. This can be hard to calculate: new technology, created jobs, educational and scientific benefits.