"A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid."
Posted on 07/20/2022 9:26:50 AM PDT by C210N
Sometimes you get lucky and equipment expected to last for a few years keep running like the Voyager probes or some of the Mars rivers. Other times you get unlucky and blow up on launch. This was unlucky and noticable, but degrading rather than destructive.
Really? Which products?
I got my credit card in hand, and I'm ready to SHOP!
/s
;-)
“Relax, all right? My old man is a television repairman, he’s got this ultimate set of tools. I can fix it.”
sun-earth L2 is a dust magnet. Hopefully they got the risk assessment and mitigation right. Space exploration is a domain where engineering is hard (Webb is a million miles outward from Earth!), but as we can see, the payoff is fabulous, especially with pushing the state of art in engineering.
At this point astronomers and astrophysicists and planetary scientists (all those exo disciplines) should be thinking about extra-terrestrial platforms for almost everything new. There’s other L2 points in the outer solar system that could conceivably support more observatories, and there may also exist useful material around those points for in-situ-resource-utilization.
Further out, even though it’s super difficult, a mission to the solar gravitational lens at 542+ AU would have a tremendous payoff.
Was this a woke impact from those who decided that Web was racist? sarc/
O'Toole's Commentary - Murphy was an optimist
I heard the same.
An observatory on the dark side of the moon would likely work well. It could be repaired, maintained and upgraded as needed as technology advances. Actually, this should have been done 35 years ago.
Except it would have to have been done remotely. All equipment, setup, etc. done via 1980s control and AI technology. Probably several failures until they got it right, we all know it wouldn’t have got past the first failure. You say set it up with a Moon base as the staging area. Given the mentality that’s existed since the 1970s, the first death would have shut that effort down. Sometimes it’s hard to believe any of our ancestors ever ventured out of their squalid village.
Now THIS is a situation where AI robotics and modular construction could be a benefit - make such an isolated system self-maintaining.
One of the big problems launching something into a Lagrange point is theory says they tend to collect lots of junk.
Not good to lose a mirror so quickly in the mission. They may have not modeled the L2 debris density correctly.
Presumably they are prioritizing the most interesting targets first in any case, as you would when you have no guarantee of a working instrument from one day to the next.
Putin’s fault.
No biggy. Even my tiny optical observatory can be operated remotely from inside my home.
Who, and why?
Back to the old drawing board 🤪
C’mon man, no one saw this coming!
"A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid."
Shields! Scotty, I need those shields!
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