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> likely to be more than $100 million annually Oof. Should the US have just partnered with Europe? Seems like a bigger telescope would have been better than t
by brucethemoose2 3y ago
> likely to be more than $100 million annually
Oof.
Should the US have just partnered with Europe? Seems like a bigger telescope would have been better than two individual projects (with one struggling significantly).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adventured 3y agoThere might be enough use demand to saturate multiple gigantic telescopes. The US should fund at least one as well.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoTechnically a bigger telescope has more throughput, right? It can expose the same spot for less time, then move onto the next observation.
- antognini 3y agoGenerally there is a lower bound because it takes a few minutes to slew to a new spot on the sky and stabilize. Very large telescopes are slower, so this will take longer, possibly 5--10 minutes. So you typically want to spend at least 20 minutes per target so that most of your time is spent observing rather than slewing. That's why there's still a lot of demand for 1-m class telescopes. There are also issues with saturation. Large telescopes simply cannot observe brighter targets because they saturate the detectors too quickly. (This is not so much of a problem for deep field objects since none of them have high surface brightness anyway, but can be a problem for brighter stars.)
- db48x 3y agoOnly if it were completely automated, or run by the full–time staff instead of by visiting astronomers. Plus, even if a new telescope is 10× better than the old one, nobody will agree to observe for 1/10th the time; it would negate the advantage of the new scope.
- bruce511 3y agoIt does make me wonder where that sort of money goes. That's roughly $275k per day. At $1k per person per day you can have 75 staff doing whatever they do (maintainence etc) and still have 200 left over. Computers? One would have thought they'd have on-site processing as part of the build cost. Electricity to run said computers? Food for the cafeteria? Presumably we can ignore accounting things like depreciation. Not that it matters I'm sure it's expensive to run, it's just that $275 k per day seems like a lot...
- dylan604 3y agoThe Tom Scott video linked else where in this thread shows that the existing 4 telescopes have on-prem facilities to resurface the mirrors with a layer of 99% pure aluminum 1000 atoms thick. I'm guessing that quality material fabricated to be installed that precisely is not cheap. The mirrors are moved around on custom built hover crafts. When the 4 scopes are used at the same time, the "plumbing" to get the lights to the instruments at the same time is so precise, it is measured in nanometers. There is nothing about these facilities that is normal off the shelf components. Everything will have a cost associated that reflects that. What ever back of the napkin math you are attempting doesn't even come close to being accurate.
- ars 3y agoThe person you are replying to is asking about operating costs, not manufacturing costs.
- opportune 3y agoI don't remember where I read it, but I'm pretty sure proposals to directly image exoplanets rely on pointing multiple telescopes at them simultaneously. So this might be ok. The biggest win would be to convince the NRO to flip some of their telescopes 180 degrees
- zardo 3y agoI'm sure the spy sats could take some pretty pictures, but I doubt you can get much science done with their image sensors.
- kouru225 3y agoI don’t think these two telescopes are interchangeable. Pretty sure the Webb telescope was designed for seeing specific light spectrums.
- Gare 3y agoELT is in southern hemisphere, TMT will be in the nothern. Just one cannot see the whole sky. So it's valuable to have both.