NASA Continues Work on Most Powerful Telescope Ever Created

[Robinhood Pandey]

I think the governments should first store the produce properly....half of what is produced in the world is wasted because it is not stored properly.Ppl are poor because the funds raised for them never reach them....the governments should get of the corruption.There are enough exigencies in politics that we have to get rid of.
The day we stop investing in science and technology we'll be doomed......developments will come to a halt.

jet batt

Now get back to the topic of telescopes

(aaj sabko pareshan karna hai )

 

[kbd-raaf]

One has to wonder if staring at rocks in space is more important than eradicating global poverty.....

You would make a good Congress Party supporter if you were Indian.

 

[Khan_patriot]

You would make a good Congress Party supporter if you were Indian.

LOL, I am not a socialist minded person if that is what you mean, actually I am a guy of hybrid beliefs but I do believe that the less fortunate should be taken care of.....

 

[Solomon2]

This project is very ambitious and absolutely amazing. It implements wholly new kinds of spacecraft technologies. It operates using concepts scarcely known back in the Apollo era: for example, had this project been tried in the 1980s it would have failed as the gravitational dynamics of semistable Lagrangian points were not sufficiently developed - though scientists thought they were!

Just the configuration of the spacecraft itself would have been inconceivable thirty years ago. The mechanical dynamics of a totally unsymmetrical structure with a large rotating mass couldn't really be modeled then. The Hubble Space Telescope, a much simpler platform, nonetheless suffered problems with the both the software and hardware of its stabilizing system. And that's despite the fact that much of it was based on existing spy satellite technology - which isn't the case here.

And the mirrors! Actually, it was the Smithsonian Institution, not NASA, that pioneered multi-segmented mirrors back in the 1970s, but the segments for this telescope can't even be fully tested on Earth!

Nobody has built anything like this! If it works - still an "if", in my opinion - it should be able to deliver amazing performance, and its position at L2 means it can make more observations for longer periods that its predecessors. My only criticism is that the design life of the spacecraft is a mere ten years.

P.S.: Don't worry about the 'scope not picking up the visible part of the spectrum. That will be done with super-large ground-based telescopes and images combined by computer - all made possible using synchronized atomic clocks that tick so fast individual light waves from different sources a million miles apart can be superimposed accurately.