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James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

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Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#151

Post by Steltek »

snakeboy wrote: post #85
Laremere wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Destin has also peaked (or very close to it) in importance of person interviewed, as he interviewed Obama during their presidency. Though, sadly not an hour long. https://youtu.be/GpWQHFzrEqc

Just out of curiosity, is it considered best practice these days to use the gender-neutral "their" even with a specific subject (Obama) who is known to use masculine pronouns for himself?

I think it would be nice if English evolved to only ungendered pronouns. Eliminates accidental offense while also reducing everyone's cognitive load.

Also, you reminded me of a quote from yesterday: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#152

Post by mrtksn »

arcticfox wrote: post #38
ragebol wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now too, since it ~doubled the science/dollar output of the telescope by doubling the lifetime. I think that's cool

"doubled" the lower bound on what was surely an extremely conservative estimate meant to avoid a perception of failure if things didn't go perfectly. The Opportunity rover had a "90-day" expected lifetime and lived until 15 years old. It's great that Ariane performed superbly but this "doubling" calculation is pretty silly.

> The Opportunity rover had a "90-day" expected lifetime and lived until 15 years old. It's great that Ariane performed superbly but this "doubling" calculation is pretty silly.

Yeah, no. JWST has a limited lifetime because of the finite fuel, that's completely different from building a machine for a purpose and the machine not falling apart at the end of the initial mission.

When people say Ariane doubled the lifetime of JWST, they mean Ariane performed much better than the allowed margins, thus pushing the fuel efficiency to its limits.

Think this, a Toyota has a lifetime of 100K miles but many get 200K out of it. That's completely different from achieving 80mpg on a car rated 40mpg.

When someone tells you that they are driving so precisely that they are getting twice the milage, is it appropriate to say "So what, my car was supposed to last 100K miles but lasted 200K"?

I think, no.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#153

Post by whatshisface »

ethbr0 wrote: post #141
gameswithgo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the case with almost all large scale human endeavors. To get things done with lots of people takes compromises. Apollo program was the same way. I assume the pyramids and roman roads and so on as well. Though to be fair at some point once the shuttle program got going someone could have aborted on it and said that really this doesn't make sense.

And the Mercury program, which launched on adapted Redstone ICBMs [0], themselves improvements on V-2s. An unfunded project that never gets built is objectively worse than a military-funded project. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-11_Redstone#Redstone_der...

If the military-funded project creates $1M worth of value using $1B of funds, the unfunded project is objectively better.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#154

Post by throwawayboise »

ethbr0 wrote: post #141
gameswithgo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the case with almost all large scale human endeavors. To get things done with lots of people takes compromises. Apollo program was the same way. I assume the pyramids and roman roads and so on as well. Though to be fair at some point once the shuttle program got going someone could have aborted on it and said that really this doesn't make sense.

And the Mercury program, which launched on adapted Redstone ICBMs [0], themselves improvements on V-2s. An unfunded project that never gets built is objectively worse than a military-funded project. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-11_Redstone#Redstone_der...

And sweeping von Braun's Nazi complicity under the rug while others were hanging from the gallows at Nuremberg.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#155

Post by ravi-delia »

egeozcan wrote: post #122
Sharlin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really easy to get a wrong intuitive sense of the size of these things! I don’t understand why space agencies don’t always have human figures for reference in their visualizations. Or even a simple scale bar! We just get these silly “the size of a tennis court” type textual comparisons. Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are, as another example.

> Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are To be fair, Perseverance looks as big as I imagined it would be, about the size of an SUV but wider (because even in 2020s, they still don't have streets in mars, what a bummer): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/mars-2020-rover-n... Or did my googling fail me? :) edit: direct image link around paywall: https://static01.nyt.com/images/202…

My mental image until I looked it up was around the size of a dog. No, I don't know why

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#156

Post by Steltek »

nexuist wrote: post #109
Dave3of5 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Hubble was put into space by a (mostly) reusable system the space shuttle STS-31. That was about 30 years ago.

Calling the Space Shuttle "mostly reusable" is laughable. It cost 1.5 billion dollars per launch [1] whereas a reused Falcon 9 costs 50 million to launch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9

I don't get the need to bag on the Shuttle program here. The Shuttle was designed nearly 50 years ago with drastically different requirements and stakeholders.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#157

Post by samstave »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #89
samstave wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I please subscribe to the raw images of ANY space telescope... I mean * WE* /paid/ for them... I would like to access the data provided in real-time. Where can one get the raw images?

> I would like to access the data provided in real-time. Telemetry is unencrypted. You have access to the data in real time. Have fun getting useful data out of it. > Where can one get the raw images? Online ,its all public. You might need a pHD to figure out how to make it useful to the mark 1 eyeball

I loved "Mark I Eyeball"

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#158

Post by js8 »

justin66 wrote: post #138
js8 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse, journalists often compare Webb with Hubble, but they mostly ignore the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Space_Observatory , which had a larger primary mirror (for example, https://webb.nasa.gov/content/observatory/ote/mirrors/index.... ). It's a very subtle form of American exceptionalism.

> It's a very subtle form of American exceptionalism. Oh, bullshit. NASA spends an awful lot of money and effort on promoting its projects to the English-language press. Does the ESA make a comparable amount of effort?

I am not sure where we disagree. I am talking about the (false) perception that the U.S. is the #1 among world nations. Maybe it is caused by comparatively higher marketing budget, but that doesn't ultimately matter, because the point is, the perception is still false, and ignoring Webb's predecessor contributes to it.

OTOH, I think Webb is amazing, and fairly, perhaps without the marketing it wouldn't even exist because of all the American deficit hawks.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#159

Post by Steltek »

js8 wrote: post #75
bestouff wrote: post #4

It's funny how the excellent job of the French Ariane launcher is nowhere to be seen in this (and others) article.

Worse, journalists often compare Webb with Hubble, but they mostly ignore the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Space_Observatory , which had a larger primary mirror (for example, https://webb.nasa.gov/content/observatory/ote/mirrors/index.... ). It's a very subtle form of American exceptionalism.

Maybe because Herschel was active for only a few years while Hubble is still going? Hubble has also produced some of the most recognizable images of space. It's clearly a name with more awareness in the general public.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#160

Post by BurningFrog »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #45
gameswithgo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined mission never happened. I wonder how much money would have been saved!

The space shuttle is a sad story. On the one hand the military’s money made it possible but they also influenced the design in a very bad way.

A pretty typical big government project to me. Lot's of power centers pulling in different directions, little focus on actual needs.

Space X does better work in part because it can make its own decisions and focus on long term goals.

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