Magellan Telescope First Mega-Mirror Polished and Ready 39
coondoggie writes "One of the six giant — 27 feet across, 20 ton — circular mirrors that will be part of the 4,000 sq. ft., Giant Magellan Telescope that ultimately look for stars, galaxies and black holes has been polished and completed — now for the other five. The mirrors will form the heart of the 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope, and when complete will provide more than 380 square meters, or 4,000 square feet, of light-collecting area."
This is a big project, not just a big mirror. From the article: "At the Carnegie Institution for Science's Las Campanas Observatory in northern Chile, earthmovers are completing the removal of 4 million cubic feet of rock to produce a flat platform for the telescope and its supporting buildings. The telescope is scheduled to come online in about 10 years.
smudgy fingers (Score:5, Funny)
No way they keep that thing clean and polished for 10 years... some jerk is gonna walk over there and wipe his finger on it. guaranteed
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Re:smudgy fingers (Score:4, Interesting)
No way they keep that thing clean and polished for 10 years... some jerk is gonna walk over there and wipe his finger on it. guaranteed
No problem if a jerk does, there's an easy way to clean it - First Contact [photoniccleaning.com]
Spray on, dry, peel off.
Used by NASA and JPL.
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10 years!?! (Score:1)
I'm wonder why anyone would even bother putting a telescope on the planet at this point, put it on the moon , no atmosphere to obstruct your view.
Re:10 years!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm wonder why anyone would even bother putting a telescope on the planet at this point
It's cheaper.
Re:10 years!?! (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, no kidding. The GMT has a total budget of $700M, JWST's annual budget is almost that much.
Re:10 years!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm wonder why anyone would even bother putting a telescope on the planet at this point
It's cheaper.
Further, with corrective optics they get amazing results. I'm a member of the Santa Cruz Astronomy Club and we have been lucky enough to have some great speakers come in from US Santa Cruz (who manage some large earthbound telescopes, including Keck on Mauna Kea, Hawaii) Directing a laser into the atmosphere allows them to correct a high percentage of anomalies, obtaining some much improved results over non-adaptive optics. This technology has given new life to old optical scopes, further cost far less than adding yet another spaceborne scope, which may lauch correctly, may deploy correctly and may work for a sufficient amount of time to justify the costs of everything, including the team using it. UCSC also does some amazing work with mirrors, polishing to molecular uniformity and applying coatings a molecule in thickness. Amazing stuff.
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It won't really be obsolete if it doesn't have any competition... This thing's gonna be MASSIVE.
ure, the James Webb telescope may be running by then (far from certain, though) but that will only observe in the infrared. And besides, do you know how much competition there will be for the exposure time? It's hard enough to get time on a good telescope as it is.
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Might have a little competition from this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope [wikipedia.org]
25m is a bit less than 30m. Just saying.
So its redundant (Score:1)
Yes, because there is so much telescope time available, and so few astronomers to use it.
Oh, wait...
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Re:10 years!?! (Score:5, Informative)
in 5 years it will be obsolete, there will be yet another telescope launched into space that can see far greater distances before this is even built.
I'm wonder why anyone would even bother putting a telescope on the planet at this point, put it on the moon , no atmosphere to obstruct your view.
4 times higher resolution than James Webb, 12 times the light collecting area, 10% of the cost.
Space telescopes are only sensible for the sections of the spectrum the earth-bound just can't do.
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I'm wonder why anyone would even bother putting a telescope on the planet at this point
This scope will cost about $700 million to build; the Hubble Space Telescope cost $2.5 billion initially, and about $10 billion over its lifetime. Much better bang-for-your-buck to build telescopes on the ground, even if the space telescopes can do more. Sometimes quantity is better than quality.
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First the James Webb Space Telescope is on the edge of being chopped from the budget, second even if it's not chopped it looks like it will be 2020+ before it launches, and third it's only better in certain parts of the spectrum. Not only that but the JWST can only observe so much of the universe at a time, having multiple mirrors collecting data means we're more likely to pick up interesting data. As to the moon idea, sure once we have a heavy launch vehicle with a non-trivial lunar orbit injection capabil
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(4.32 x 10^-6) / (525600 * 60)
Time isn't metric, but all you need to know is 60 seconds per minute and that song from Rent.
See that (Score:2)
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The mirror lab is built under the nosebleed section of the stadium, so it's not a cellar at all. It's a five story building built on a former parking lot.
27 what? (Score:1)
How much is this in bushels per acre?
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Maybe the scope... (Score:3)