"Lucky" Camera Technology Blows Away Hubble

[Phil153]

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A fleet of cheap high orbit telescopes with a much wider range of imaging technologies would have cost a fraction as much and produced vastly more science.

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Why didn't private industry launch them? There's a whole world full of companies and investors and benevolent billionaires out there. It took 17 years and many technological advances to outdo the Hubble, and in the meantime it benefited science and humanity greatly. So your opinion is pretty damn weak and not backed up by any evidence (in fact, contradicted by it). Go figure.

[PLOlover]

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and in the meantime it benefited science and humanity greatly.

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it did?

[Borodog]

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A fleet of cheap high orbit telescopes with a much wider range of imaging technologies would have cost a fraction as much and produced vastly more science.

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Why didn't private industry launch them?

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Because they would have been a giant waste of money.

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There's a whole world full of companies and investors and benevolent billionaires out there. It took 17 years and many technological advances to outdo the Hubble, and in the meantime it benefited science and humanity greatly.

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lol.

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So your opinion is pretty damn weak and not backed up by any evidence (in fact, contradicted by it). Go figure.

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lol. Way to completely forget (dodge?) the point:

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A fleet of cheap high orbit telescopes with a much wider range of imaging technologies would have cost a fraction as much and produced vastly more science.

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[Borodog]

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and in the meantime it benefited science and humanity greatly.

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it did?

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Phil just likes to take the opposite of any position I hold, regardless of what that position might be.

[wacki]

Can this technology beat the hubble deep field also known as "The Most Important Image Ever Taken"? No.

If NASA shot down alternatives may I suggest you edit Hubble's wikipedia page? If you know something that the public does not know then surely wikipedia is the best place to educate others. Don't forget your sources though. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[Borodog]

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Can this technology beat the hubble deep field also known as "The Most Important Image Ever Taken"? No.

If NASA shot down alternatives may I suggest you edit Hubble's wikipedia page? If you know something that the public does not know then surely wikipedia is the best place to educate others. Don't forget your sources though. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

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Your snarkiness concerning subjects that you know little about does not impress me.

There are a LOT of people in the community, professional astronmers and astrophysicists, even within NASA itself, who agree with me that the ratio of dollars spent to science produced was far lower than it could have been.

Dozens of space telescopes with widely varying instrumentation technologies could have been put into space, year after year, for the money spent on Hubble, which is closing in on ten billion dollars. Drive to Goddard Space Flight Center and ask them if you don't believe me. I doubt opinions have changed much in the 11 years since I was there.

[Arp220]

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and in the meantime it benefited science and humanity greatly.

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it did?

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Phil just likes to take the opposite of any position I hold, regardless of what that position might be.

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All right. I'll address your points, in more detail. Not to be too confrontational about it, but you're talking crap [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]. Enumerating responses nicely:

1 - The specific comparison between palomar and hubble is not a good one. palomar did achieve better spatial resolution, but theres a few caveats (a) even with good weather palomar cant see as deep as hubble, (2) palomar is located at a pretty terrible observing site generally and so has many MANY cloudy nights, and (c) using laser guide star adaptive optics needs the absolute best possible weather. I would guess that theres maybe 2 weeks worth out of each year where such observations are even possible at palomar.

2 - In my view, HST was not the best use of a few billion, but it certainly was not a 'boondoggle'. It has provided unique and extremely important science, and is still arguably the best optical telescope available as of now. For the first ten years of its life, even in the first year or two when the mirror was uncorrected, it completely blew everything else out of the water. Its scientific impact has been immense.

3 - HST vs a small fleet of high orbit satellites. HST has cost about 6 billion. Roughly. Launching any satellite with a primary mirror of width greater than about a meter, and with good surface accuracy (i.e. the kind of primary that can do optical observations) will cost a BARE MINIMUM of about half a billion. So the cost differential is not particularly big. Plus, if something goes wrong on your little satellite, you're screwed. You can't fix it and it's money down the drain. HST was both fixed and upgraded multiple times. In essence, HST has been two or three telescopes, not one.

Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong, but bear in mind that I'm a professional astronomer, have observed with HST, and have observed at palomar, and have published papers in 'learned journals' using both HST and palomar data [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Borodog]

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and in the meantime it benefited science and humanity greatly.

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it did?

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Phil just likes to take the opposite of any position I hold, regardless of what that position might be.

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All right. I'll address your points, in more detail. Not to be too confrontational about it, but you're talking crap [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]. Enumerating responses nicely:

1 - The specific comparison between palomar and hubble is not a good one. palomar did achieve better spatial resolution, but theres a few caveats (a) even with good weather palomar cant see as deep as hubble, (2) palomar is located at a pretty terrible observing site generally and so has many MANY cloudy nights, and (c) using laser guide star adaptive optics needs the absolute best possible weather. I would guess that theres maybe 2 weeks worth out of each year where such observations are even possible at palomar.

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I'm not denying that the new technology does not beat Hubble in every category. I just thought it was an interesting article about a fascinating new telescope technology. Dollars spent per science produced, I think the new technology will handily beat Hubble. It was an offhand remark about Hubble that set the Usual Suspects around here off, the ones who disagree with everything I say just for the fun of it.

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2 - In my view, HST was not the best use of a few billion, but it certainly was not a 'boondoggle'.

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This is pretty much the definition of a boondoogle; taking billions of dollars and spending it on something that is not the best use of it.

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It has provided unique and extremely important science, and is still arguably the best optical telescope available as of now. For the first ten years of its life, even in the first year or two when the mirror was uncorrected, it completely blew everything else out of the water. Its scientific impact has been immense.

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The classic fallacy of economics. You are only considering what you can see, and not what you can't see, because they are not there, because the money was spent on Hubble.

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3 - HST vs a small fleet of high orbit satellites. HST has cost about 6 billion. Roughly. Launching any satellite with a primary mirror of width greater than about a meter, and with good surface accuracy (i.e. the kind of primary that can do optical observations) will cost a BARE MINIMUM of about half a billion. So the cost differential is not particularly big. Plus, if something goes wrong on your little satellite, you're screwed. You can't fix it and it's money down the drain. HST was both fixed and upgraded multiple times. In essence, HST has been two or three telescopes, not one.

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Hubble is closing in on 10 billion last I heard, but that's neither here nor there. You also don't need to put a scope into HEO, you can use a much cheaper escape orbit for half the cost. So we're talking about dozens of missions, versus the "2 or 3" you claim for Hubble. When the scopes are cheap, it doesn't matter if one or two fail. When Hubble's main mirror was ground wrong it was a COLLOSAL mistake.

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Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong, but bear in mind that I'm a professional astronomer, have observed with HST, and have observed at palomar, and have published papers in 'learned journals' using both HST and palomar data [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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Thanks for your opinion, but nothing you've said has contradicted anything I've said. You're just crafting apologetics for the numbers. While I have not personally observed with HST or Palomar (I'm an astrophysicist, not an astronomer), I work with people have who observed with HST, and they agree with me, although admittedly their terminology probably wouldn't be as harsh.

Characterizing my opinion as "crap" when you admit that Hubble was not the best use of billions and, by your own numbers, admit that of order 12 missions could have been launched for the price tag of Hubble does not reflect well on you.

[Borodog]

One last thing. If you think Hubble was not a "boondoogle", divide its total price tag by the total number of refereed papers published based on Hubble data. I just did this. It's about a million dollars per paper if we accept the lower $6B price tag.

[Phil153]

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The classic fallacy of economics. You are only considering what you can see, and not what you can't see, because they are not there, because the money was spent on Hubble.

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Which is the greater fallacy:

[ ] discussing the actual worth of what actually existed, in response to a question about hubble's impact/worth

[ ] claiming as absolute fact that an unrealized and untested solution "would have cost a fraction as much and produced vastly more science."

[ ] Pretending your opponent has a position that he never actually held.

I think you have a problem with English. He doesn't appear to be claiming that Hubble was "the best possible telescope of all the possible solutions" (that would be silly), he's discussing the actual worth of hubble compared to other available telescopes at the time, in response to a question of how much it actually impacted science and humanity.

But don't let that stop you from driving the freight train of your opinion over someone's considered thoughts.