Posted on 08/21/2006 9:20:30 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Thus, over a period of five years -- 1989 to 1994 -- the two major space agencies had rejected a total of four major proposals for large radiatively cooled telescopes operating at infrared/sub-millimeter wavelengths. Nonetheless, the paradigm had shifted. For the first time large infrared telescopes seemed possible and the L2 Lagrangian point became the preferred location for missions of all kinds. Although proposals for a large-aperture radiatively-cooled infrared telescope would never win either an ESA or a NASA competition, "conventional wisdom" had moved on from cryogenic cooling. In 1996, the Dressler Committees "HST & Beyond" identified Edison and High-Z as the design paradigm for future infrared telescopes. As a result, Edward Weiler at NASA Headquarters directed modest funding for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to begin preliminary design work on three concepts for future post-HST space telescopes. All the design groups -- two aerospace teams and the GSFC team, led by John Mather and Pierre Bely, who were early supporters of Hawardens work -- developed designs for large, passively-cooled infrared telescopes. The convergence of those three concepts would eventually lead to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
(Excerpt) Read more at thespacereview.com ...
A decade before the Spitzer infrared telescope and twenty years before the expected launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a small band of European and American astronomers proposed a large-aperture, very lightweight radiatively cooled infrared telescope operating at the Sun-Earth L2 point The story of how a radical new way to do infrared astronomy from space was conceived, and refused to go away, is a lesson for anyone who seeks to buck conventional wisdom and struggles to persuade others to think "outside the box". (credit: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)
Cool things like this makes me wish I'd gone into astrophysics.
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