by Astronomy has a bright future.
The universe is being revealed in exquisite detail as the current generation of large optical telescopes reaches back next to the big bang. There is hope that the mystery of dark dark and dark energy to resolve. Thousands exoplanet discovered, and astronomers could be approaching the first detection of life beyond Earth.
However, observations of the cosmic limit involve extremely faint targets and astronomers are always hungry for more light. To peer further into the unknown reaches of the universe, the next generation of giant telescopes on the ground and in orbit will cost billions of dollars. That price tag results in a collision between scientific aspirations and fiscal realities.
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Large Glass Cost
For most of the history of astronomy until 1980, there was an opinion telescope cost scaling with mirror diameter, where the cost was equal to the diameter of the telescope multiplied to the power of 2.8. That meant that if the amount doubled, the cost went up by a factor of seven – and if the amount tripled, the cost went up by a factor of twenty-two. Many people suspect that there is more than a telescope Palomar 5-meter that would ever be taken.
Over the past four decades, however, telescope costs have increased at a shallower rate with size, breaking the previous cost curve. The IS innovations This change was due to thinner and lighter mirrors, the practice of making a large collection area out of a mosaic of smaller mirrors, using fast optics to enable more compact telescope designs, and to reduce the size of telescope enclosures. Thanks to these innovations, sixteen telescopes with diameters between 6 meters and 12 meters between 1993 and 2006.
The Quest for a Giant Telescope
The 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 have major funding problems. There are two American-led projects with international partners. The IS Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) the project uses a design with 492 mirror elements. He faces headwinds from the opposition Native Hawaiian to build another large telescope on Mauna Kea, which they consider a sacred site. Another project, the Magellan giant telescope (GMT), combining seven 8.4-meter mirrors to make an effective aperture of 25 meters.
The TMT project has stalled as it negotiates a way to begin construction in Hawaii. The GMT and another large telescope being built in Chile, the Rubin Observatory, facing rising costs. The pandemic, inflation, and supply chain problems is to blame. TMT and GMT will cost about $3 billion each. Both have philanthropic support, but they are also dependent federal funding. For a time, it was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). both projects. But recently, the The National Science Board set a $1.6 billion cap on federal support for large telescopes and gave the NSF until May to decide which project to support. There will be one large telescope left out in the cold.
Meanwhile, the Europeans are sitting pretty. The IS An extremely large telescope (ELT) is the third giant telescope, currently under construction in Chile. There are no financial obstacles before the ELT since it is being built by the Southern European Observatory, which is funded by an intergovernmental contract. At 39-metres in diameter, the ELT is the largest of the three telescopes, and will completed firstin the year 2028.
The Telescope That Ate Astronomy
Space telescopes cost a a thousand times more per kilogram than the telescopes on the ground, but it is worth their high price. These telescopes take advantage of the total darkness of the space environment, and these telescopes can observe many types of radiation such as gamma rays, ultraviolet light, and infrared radiation that cannot enter the Earth’s atmosphere for ground-based telescopes. to achieve established.
One such instrument, the Hubble Space Telescope, has a total cost of $16 billion since the US Congress approved its mission in 1977. Another, NASA’s James Webb Telescope, has faced delays and technical challenges, and its budget has increased to $5 billion. Its price tag helped earn it the nickname “the telescope that ate astronomy” — and that was in 2010. By the time it launched in 2021, the price tag which was doubled to $10 billion.
NASA has other exciting missions on the horizon. The IS Roman Space Telescopewith a 2.4-meter mirror only a hundred times Hubble’s field of view, it is likely to cost over $3 billionand the Inhabitable Life Observatorydesigned to “sniff” the atmospheres of Earth-like planets for traces of biology, will come around $11 billion.
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These space telescope missions take a big bite out of a NASA budget that was declining for twenty years. Just as is the case with NSF budget caps, large capital projects leave less money to spend on other types of research. But the private sector may come to the rescue. Starship SpaceX used to ship a 6.5-meter mirror in one piece, avoiding the complex and expensive folding mirrors used by JSWT. The same innovations could be used with ground-based telescopes cut the cost telescopes in space.
Faced with the costs of observing the distant universe and rocks returning from a nearby planet, astronomers and planetary scientists are being brought back to Earth with a bang. Although it appears to be a golden age for astronomy, the glamor has been dampened by the cost of all that gold and the tough trade-offs that must be made in times of fiscal austerity.
