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The thing they’re talking about is a telescope. They incidentally have a CO2 meter there. Running just the CO2 meter is something that could be done remotely,
by timr 1y ago
The thing they’re talking about is a telescope. They incidentally have a CO2 meter there.
Running just the CO2 meter is something that could be done remotely, without the need for a telescope, at a tiny fraction of the cost.
- teamonkey 1y agoIt's not a cheap CO2 room sensor you got off aliexpress.
- timr 1y agoI didn’t say it was. It’s still orders of magnitude cheaper than maintaining an entire telescope complex on top of a Hawaiian island.
- teamonkey 1y agoI think you’re thinking of the complex on Mauna Kea (which has several individual sites and has funding from several countries). Mauna Loa has a telescope that studies the Sun in order to help understand better how that contributes to changing weather patterns on Earth. It is a relatively small site but very important. The reason that telescopes are often in high up, hard to reach places is because that is the most efficient, cost-effective place for them to be.
- apical_dendrite 1y agoI think you are just fundamentally confused. There are two separate entities with similar names. There's the Mauna Loa Observatory, which is what's being discussed here, and there are the Mauna Kea Observatories. The latter one has the telescopes. The Mauna Loa Observatory monitors the atmosphere. It has other types of sensors that are useful for atmospheric science. It isn't an astronomical observatory that just happens to have a CO2 sensor. It was specifically set up in the 1950s to study the atmosphere because of the advantages of being at that specific location. It just happens to have a name that's similar to an institution that does have telescopes. Perhaps you should have some basic familiarity with what they do before deciding that they shouldn't be doing it. https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/programs.html https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/programs.html
- tito 1y agoIt literally says close the facility in the budget. It's a little shed on top of the mountain. Here's a picture: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mauna-loa-observatory/ https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mauna-loa-...