4 ms·
The Big Fringe Telescope
- rich_sasha 2y ago[flagged]
- marcosdumay 2y agoAll the names of large telescopes have been jokes for some 3 decades already.
- cyberax 2y agoExcept for the TMT. And look at what happened.
- willy_k 2y agoHow are James Webb or Hubble jokes? Genuinely curious
- Larrikin 2y agoThe names of telescopes usually change once they are built.
- ceejayoz 2y agoIt's more stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope.
- onionisafruit 2y ago“James Webb”. They names a telescope after spider from Slow Horses? Seriously it makes me wonder if nobody in production was familiar with the real James Webb.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- slwvx 2y agoIf I understand Table 4 [1] correctly, they estimate the cost to be $28.5M, which looks inexpensive for a cutting-edge telescope (BTW, the new html papers on arxiv are nice). Phys.org [2] has further details. [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2408.01386v1#S5 https://arxiv.org/html/2408.01386v1#S5 [2] https://phys.org/news/2024-08-inexpensive-kilometer-telescope-exoplanet-movies.html https://phys.org/news/2024-08-inexpensive-kilometer-telescop...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 2y agoHas there ever once been a telescope that cost what was initially estimated? I would expect that price to more than double at least
- mapt 2y agoA lot of these estimates seem to be using a projected present price - this is what it costs for the hardware if you build it now - rather than what it would cost if you delay 15 years to slow-roll the program and keep a portion of an academic lab's human resource (and thus a portion of a research university, who take their large cut) alive on shoestring grants in the meantime to run it. This is one of the many reasons I tend to favor doing big hardware spends on programs to complete them at scale in five years or less. If it's projected at $50M for N science capability, why not built it at $100M for 10N science capability starting yesterday instead of building it at $125M for N science capability starting after fifteen years of being the hobby fixation of a few scientists? There are large economies of scale associated with increasing manufacturing spend in an R&D intensive area, and larger associated with getting the results sooner than later.
- prpl 2y agoThe big spend is okay for construction executed by the trades but it doesn’t scale to e.g. instrumentation or software. You can’t integrate in parallel for many of the systems
- aaron695 2y ago[flagged]
- BillSaysThis 2y ago"ooga booga indigenous groups" Whoa, wtaf dude?!?!
- bloopernova 2y agoThey're a troll that thrives on negative attention.
- v8xi 2y agoWas curious what types of observations they'd do with this and found this site: https://www.universetoday.com/168209/the-big-fringe-telescope-a-2-2-kilometer-telescope-on-the-cheap-and-it-can-make-exoplanet-movies/ https://www.universetoday.com/168209/the-big-fringe-telescop... From there: Dr. van Belle continues, “Observations of binary star systems let us determine the masses because of their orbital motion around each other, and BFT adds extra value by then directly measuring the radii of those stars. Resolved exoplanet transits is going to be the wicked cool one. We will be able to see the resolved disk of another world as it passes in front of its host star. This sort of thing will be good for further characterization of exoplanets, as well as searches for exomoons. There’s a bunch of other BFT science that isn’t part of the core ‘marquee’ cases – many hundreds of different types of stars that we’ll be able to make pictures of and see how those pictures change over time.”