4 ms·
That's what I thought about Curiosity's skycrane, and that ended up working out pretty well. Yes, it's complicated, but I'm willing to accept that my intuition
by teraflop 7y ago
That's what I thought about Curiosity's skycrane, and that ended up working out pretty well.
Yes, it's complicated, but I'm willing to accept that my intuitions about whether something is too complicated are wrong when we're talking about something that actual rocket scientist have spent millions of hours planning.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoI don't recall ever saying it was too complicated. I only indicated extremely complex, which it is. Millions of man hours have been lost to bad units. Rocket scientists are human.
- warent 7y agoI'm not sure why you're splitting hairs on this. GP is merely addressing your "extreme pessimism" but now for whatever reason you're either arguing semantics or showing some kind of cognitive dissonance.
- falcrist 7y agoI can't let go of my intuition that complex deployment procedures carry an inherent additional risk to the mission. Now, maybe that additional risk is less than the risk of doing it a different way, but that just means the mission is particularly risky. That appears to be the case with the JWST in any case. Space is hard. We've failed many times. It seems rational to be concerned in this case.
- Gravityloss 7y agoYou can retire risk and accelerate progress by launching more smaller missions and accepting that some of them fail. The public must be enlightened enough to understand that occasional failure ia a much faster and better and even cheaper path to success.
- petschge 7y agoThe science done by a bunch of smaller IR telescope is different from what you can do with JWST. (Basically you are reducing resolution but get better time coverage of transients.)
- Gravityloss 7y agoYes. But you can retire the risk of technologies like segmented mirrors or complex deployment in smaller missions. These missions don't even need to be physically small. Then launch the more expensive one.
- HeadsUpHigh 7y agoYou can combine multiple mirrors like they did with the black hole photo.
- tomr_stargazer 7y agoIn this case, the black hole image was created with radio interferometry, in which you can separately record electromagnetic waves from individual radio telescopes and then combine them electronically after-the-fact. Visible and infrared interferometry is much more technically challenging because the frequencies are orders of magnitude too high to record in the same way, and so it hasn't really been successfully applied in space. (See the Space Interferometry Mission[0] for one sort-of attempt at this kind of thing.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Interferometry_Mission#Instruments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Interferometry_Mission#I...
- petschge 7y agoThis requires keeping the baseline constant to a fraction of the wave length. In other words you would have to position the satellites with a accuracy of 100 nm relative to each other. In other words: No we can not (, yet. For a decade at least).
- ATsch 7y ago
- azernik 7y agoIt does absolutely increase risk, which everyone in the industry recognizes - people talk about things like minimizing separation events as a tool for reducing risk. When you're stuck doing risky stuff like this, you can compensate pretty easily by throwing an enormous testing budget at the thing, which is a big part of the ballooning cost of JWST.