The Moon acts as a physical shield that isolates a far-side lunar-surface telescope from radio interference from sources on the Earth’s surface, the ionosphere, Earth-orbiting satellites, and the Sun’s radio emission during the lunar night.
I’m also not sure it would be that much more effort. Economically speaking, most of the cost probably comes from rocket launches, which are roughly similar for Moon missions and other far-out space missions. Construction on the Moon has unique challenges (sharp regolith, temperatures), but you get a supporting base for free. If you had to supply and launch support structures, it might be more costly overal.
You don’t need any supporting base when floating around. But you absolutely need to deal with the gravity there. Also, since you don’t just have to reach but land on the moon too, I assume it absolutely takes a lot more effort per mass. Unless you can impact the moon at full speed.
You don’t need any supporting base when floating around.
Not to resist gravity, yes. But you need some supporting structure to keep things apart which are meant to be apart, and keep things together so they don’t drift away into space. The general frame of the object, so to say. If you don’t use a natural crater to support your telescope, you need to create some kind of structure to do that job for you.
since you don’t just have to reach but land on the moon too, I assume it absolutely takes a lot more effort per mass. Unless you can impact the moon at full speed.
A similar thing is true for any point in empty space. It’s not enough to get there, you need to decelerate to come to rest when you reached the destination. Yes, when landing on the Moon you need to additionally fight it’s gravity. I still think the energy required to leave Earth vastly outweights the energy required for the final approach. After checking [The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation (NASA)] it seems my estimation was exaggerated, but still right in principle. The most energy will be spent on reaching LEO, and landing on the Moon instead of going to a cis-lunar destination is a difference of 11.5 or 14 (total trip costs) compared to 8 for the initial lift. Numbers from the first table.
Either way, this is amateurs arguing what experts should do. The better approach is probably to dive into their documents to understand their reasoning. Even if we’d agree they should build their telescope in space, that would maybe rather hint at us missing some insight.
Your don’t decelerate to come to rest. You essentially accelerate until you reach the desired height of your orbit, then accelerate some more to turn the elliptical orbit into whichever shape your want it to be. This is as efficient as it gets.
Also, since there is only micro gravity, there is no need for a good structural support. When it can withstand the launch, it is already way overkill for microgravity, at least the systems we currently use. There is a lot of improvement to be made.
I find it very interesting and I want to do one with my kids. The guide is good from a step by step point of view about how to make one, but I think a couple of examples about what kind of data can someone get with it and what can someone expect to “view” could be very helpfull too
sounds like a resonable ask. Every mission relies on the DSN, or one other countries run, and i know we are only going to want increasing range and data rates in the future.
It makes sense, but it’s also annoying. Now instead of which planet is closest, the question should be which planets in our solar system have the closest orbital radius to ours? And then it can still be mars and venus. Thankfully in school the question was based from the sun outward. In which case the order isn’t fussed with.
This article reads like a smarmy kid who just wants to say the clichéd “acktually” with it’s technical truth.
It’s like asking “how much of the earth is water” vs “how much of the earth’s surface is covered by water”. Those are two very different answers, but if you ask people the first with no context they will answer with the answer for the second most of the time because it’s the thing we’ve heard so much from schooling days.
So we can deduce that the density and volume of the gas envelope is a function of the mass of the planet, the temperature of the star and the distance of the planet’s orbit. This would mean, generally, that rocky planets are most common closer to the star than gas giants, and so the configuration we see here is not uncommon. This would also mean an earth sized planet occupying an orbit a little farther out would be bigger with a larger gas envelope, and that in our orbit the planet would be bigger and have one.
That is an interesting observation. This means that dwarf stars, which are much more common than a star like the sun, are very unlikely to have a rocky planet with the same size and orbit of Earth. But a giant star like Betelgeuse might have a rocky planet much bigger than Earth. Although a full orbit of Betelgeuse would take a long time.
<span style="color:#323232;">The astronomers will tell you it is just an optical illusion, a pair of galaxies caught in the act of mating as seen from the wrong angle. Happens all the time.
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">In the 1960 and 70s, Halton Arp, an astronomer at Hale Observatories in Southern California, caused a ruckus by asserting that galaxies millions of light-years apart according to conventional cosmological calculations — but which appeared superimposed together in the sky — were interacting locally. His claim cast doubt on the Big Bang theory of the universe. Astronomers now agree that he was wrong.
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">Now a genuine question mark has been discovered, in the corner of a recent Webb telescope observation of a pair of dust clouds known as Herbig-Haro 46/47 that are in the process of forming into two stars. The discovery made a splash on social media. “Ze space mall information kiosk has been found by JWST,” a commenter joked on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">Chris Britt, an astronomer at the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs the Webb telescope, attempted to explain. “This particular pair is so far away, it’s hard to make out much detail,” he said in an email exchange. “But there are some similar looking galaxy mergers that have been seen closer to us, including this one called II Zwicky 96.”
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">If you accept the spooky rules of quantum mechanics and the premise, as Einstein disapprovingly put it, that God plays dice with the universe, then you have to accept that chance and randomness are a fundamental bedrock of reality. In such a universe, where the laws of physics have been grinding away for 14 billion years, coincidences are unforeseeable but inevitable.
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">Image
</span><span style="color:#323232;">A thin horizontal orange cloud known as Herbig-Haro 46/47 is uneven with rounded ends and tilted from bottom left to top right. At its center is a red-and-pink star with prominent, eight-pointed diffraction spikes. The background is filled with stars and galaxies.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">An image of Herbig-Haro 46/47. The question mark appears at the center-bottom of the frame, to the right of the reddish cloudy material.Credit...NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI)
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">Still, there are times when it’s worth stepping back to listen to “the music,” as Einstein once referred to the beauty and mystery of the cosmos. You are free to consider that question mark as alien graffiti, a comment on both their and our relation to existence. Point being, we’ve barely begun to know anything — that’s why we build telescopes.
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">Once the Webb has completed its rounds of investigations two decades from now, we might know a bit more about how this bowl of stars works. But we still won’t know why we’re here. That question mark, our profound cosmic ignorance, is one of the great gifts of science.
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I wonder if they have a simulated Voyager 1 they test their solutions on first. Having two full days between patch and response from the real one is hard to imagine.
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