Astronomy has a bright future.The universe is being revealed in exquisite detail with the current generation of large optical telescopes, reaching back close to the big bang. There’s hope that the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy will be solved. Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, and astronomers may be closing in on the first detection of life beyond Earth.However, observations into the cosmic frontier involve extremely faint targets and astronomers are always hungry for more light. In order to keep peering farther into unknown reaches of the universe, the next generation of giant telescopes on the ground and in orbit will each cost billions of dollars. That price tag is leading to a collision between scientific aspirations and fiscal realities.Related: The 10 biggest telescopes on EarthThe Cost of Big GlassFor most of the history of astronomy until 1980, there was an approximate scaling of telescope cost with mirror diameter, where cost was equal to the telescope’s diameter multiplied to the 2.8 power. That meant if the size doubled, the cost went up by a factor of seven — and if the size tripled, the cost went up by a factor of twenty-two. Many people doubted that a telescope larger than the Palomar 5-meter would ever be built.In the past four decades, however, telescope costs have gone up at a shallower rate with size, breaking the previous cost curve. The innovations that led to this change were thinner and lighter mirrors, the practice of making a large collecting area from a mosaic of smaller mirrors, using fast optics to enable more compact telescope designs, and shrinking the sizes of telescope enclosures. Thanks to these innovations, sixteen telescopes with diameters between 6 meters and 12 meters were built between 1993 and 2006.The Quest for Gigantic TelescopesThe next generation of extremely large telescopes will have 100 times the light-gathering power and 10 times the image quality of the Hubble Space Telescope. However, they’re running into serious funding problems. There are two American-led projects with international partners. The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project uses a design with 492 mirror segments. It faces headwinds from the opposition of native Hawaiians to construction of another large telescope on Mauna Kea, which they consider to be a sacred site. Another project, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), is combining seven 8.4-meter mirror …
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnAstronomy has a bright future.The universe is being revealed in exquisite detail with the current generation of large optical telescopes, reaching back close to the big bang. There’s hope that the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy will be solved. Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, and astronomers may be closing in on the first detection of life beyond Earth.However, observations into the cosmic frontier involve extremely faint targets and astronomers are always hungry for more light. In order to keep peering farther into unknown reaches of the universe, the next generation of giant telescopes on the ground and in orbit will each cost billions of dollars. That price tag is leading to a collision between scientific aspirations and fiscal realities.Related: The 10 biggest telescopes on EarthThe Cost of Big GlassFor most of the history of astronomy until 1980, there was an approximate scaling of telescope cost with mirror diameter, where cost was equal to the telescope’s diameter multiplied to the 2.8 power. That meant if the size doubled, the cost went up by a factor of seven — and if the size tripled, the cost went up by a factor of twenty-two. Many people doubted that a telescope larger than the Palomar 5-meter would ever be built.In the past four decades, however, telescope costs have gone up at a shallower rate with size, breaking the previous cost curve. The innovations that led to this change were thinner and lighter mirrors, the practice of making a large collecting area from a mosaic of smaller mirrors, using fast optics to enable more compact telescope designs, and shrinking the sizes of telescope enclosures. Thanks to these innovations, sixteen telescopes with diameters between 6 meters and 12 meters were built between 1993 and 2006.The Quest for Gigantic TelescopesThe next generation of extremely large telescopes will have 100 times the light-gathering power and 10 times the image quality of the Hubble Space Telescope. However, they’re running into serious funding problems. There are two American-led projects with international partners. The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project uses a design with 492 mirror segments. It faces headwinds from the opposition of native Hawaiians to construction of another large telescope on Mauna Kea, which they consider to be a sacred site. Another project, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), is combining seven 8.4-meter mirror …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
