World's Highest and India's Largest Gamma-Ray Telescope To Go Live in Ladakh this Year (theprint.in) 12
India's largest and the world's highest gamma-ray telescope is set to go live later this year, aiming to provide a new window into distant stars and galaxies in the universe. From a report: The Major Atmospheric Cherenkov Experiment Telescope (MACE) in Hanle, Ladakh, is placed at an altitude of 4,300 metres above sea level. It is the world's second-largest, ground-based gamma-ray telescope with a 21-metre-diameter dish. The largest telescope of the same class is the 28-metre-diameter telescope, which is part of the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) in Namibia. "The installation of the telescope is complete and trial runs are being carried out. It will go live later this year. The first science results from this project will come in a year or two," Nilay Bhatt, a researcher at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), told ThePrint. The project is a collaboration of scientists from BARC, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, along with the Electronics Corporation of India Limited.
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How are we going to get humanity off this rock stuck in a gravity well unless we explore the Universe? The only way for humanity to survive long term is to colonize the Universe. We should be shifting all available resources to efforts to get us off this rock.
Re:I'm all for science, but can't we start at home (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of complaint irritates me (which may be the point). At best, it's a shallow criticism. Based on the best numbers I could find, the cost of this new telescope [wikivisually.com] is estimated at 400 million Indian Rupees (about 5.7 million US dollars, according to Google -- and that number is from 2014). Another article, from 2013, estimates Rs 39 crore [indiatimes.com] (390 million Rupees -- dang, that's a long URL). 6 million dollars would be a major bargain, large-telescope-wise.
So, just for scale, the US "Department of Defense estimates [wikipedia.org] that $652,225,000,000 will actually be spent" in fiscal year 2019. That would be about 114,000 times as much as this telescope cost (to build, not to operate). So the cost of this telescope is about what DoD spends in about five minutes. The budget for US Health and Human Services (HHS) [hhs.gov] is $1216 billion (that's 1.2 trillion dollars, by the US definition). NASA got $21.5 billion.
Second, what do you mean by "poverty reduction, education, health sciences"? Keep in mind that a cost to one person is income to another person. At least some of the cost of building and operating this telescope is going to people in India -- who probably aren't the poorest, but who would be poorer than they are if not for this telescope.
Spending money on a telescope is probably not the most efficient way to reduce poverty, but then there's a lot of disagreement about just how to reduce poverty -- and a lot of the problems aren't due to a lack of money, they're more about politics, corruption, inequality, and the distribution of money.
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Approximately 65 percent are found in homeless shelters, and the other 35 percent (just under 200,000)are found unsheltered on our streets (in places not intended for human habitation, such as sidewalks, parks, cars, or abandoned buildings).
What! U built a space station!
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I came here expecting to see this, and sure as hell there it is. All those evil scientists sucking all the money out of our economy to get rich of those luxurious research grants! Oh, the horror! I may have palpitations . . .
Moron.
Not exactly a gamma-ray telescope (Score:5, Informative)
I wondered how they could catch gamma rays with a 21-meter dish, given that most materials are transparent to gamma rays. That was a challenge when building the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The referenced article explains: the telescope doesn't directly observe gamma rays, it looks for the Cherenkov radiation produced when gamma rays hit the upper atmosphere.
This article [thehindubusinessline.com] (from September, 2018) mentions yet another gamma-ray telescope at the same site (which already has some others), which "will work in tandem with MACE (Major Atmospheric Cerenkov Experiment) - a 21-metre diameter gamma ray imaging telescope which is also under installation at Hanle. While MACE will operate in discovery mode looking at candidate sources of gamma ray or very faint objects, the new telescope will keep an eye on blazars. Whenever there is any flaring activity in any of them, it will alert MACE which will then shift its focus to the active blazer."
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There is more to it than aperture size: our atmosphere does not allow gamma rays in [humboldt.edu]. That is why direct observation of gamma rays must be done via a satellite telescope above the atmosphere.
That is why this India project uses Cherenkov radiation to observe gamma ray hitting the upper atmosphere. There is no other Earth based way to do it.
Just like the MAGIC telescope [wikipedia.org] does it.