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Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

science.nasa.gov

101–110 of 115 posts

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks? Of course there have long been plans to go back to the moon because its a cool fun thing to do and whoever happens to be president would likely be well remembered for taking credit for it. That doesn't give it credibility as a useful en…

> How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? You've just changed your argument as I addressed your previous argument. Which clearly demonstrates that you don't have actual arguments against the Artemis program, rather you have some personal problem with Elon Musk. That's fine, we all have our personal heros and villains. But don't be so disingenuous with your arguments or your reasoning.

It looks to me like they fully addressed your comment. Did you read their entire response?

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a joke or just a demonstration of ignorance? The name Obamacare was not given to it by Obama, but by opponents of the law. The Obama administration just leaned into it. Blame conservatives if the name bothers you, not Obama and his administration from the time.

Wrong. Obama himself uses that name https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/obama-i-like-t...

Reread my comment. I said he leaned into it. If you are unfamiliar with that phrase it means (in this context) that he accepted and adopted the term, but he did not coin it. Which was your original, false, claim.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you see it wrong. Plans for returning humans to the surface of the moon have been being developed for longer than you've known Musk's name. The Artemis program was developed out of the Constellation program, which was initiated sometime around 2005 or 6.

How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks? Of course there have long been plans to go back to the moon because its a cool fun thing to do and whoever happens to be president would likely be well remembered for taking credit for it. That doesn't give it credibility as a useful en…

More science was done on the few hours spent on the Moon by astronauts than all the lunar and Mars robotic missions (lasting decades) combined. Robots won’t be comparable to human exploration until we have general AI and that’s far away. Otherwise you’d have a lot more robotic exploration on Earth.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#105
post #73
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why build one when you can build two for twice the price?

I always thought this was a ridiculous part of the movie but it truly stuck with me more anything.

I regular consult for government agencies.

It’s true, but the factor is ten, not two.

And then they won’t even use any of the things they overpaid for!

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#106
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's horrifying! what if you want to work on the processing algorithms themselves? can't you access the raw input data?

If their platform allows any kind of processing as it sounds then anyone could just dump the data. So I don't see why they would not allow downloads for local processing.

Reading between the lines, I assume they aren't reasonably capable of serving up ~TB scale data to hundreds (thousands? more?) of separate clients per day. The usual fix for this would be something like an AWS requester pays bucket.

To your question specifically, in such a scenario they would charge an obscene amount for the bandwidth so you would be strongly incentivized not to download hundreds of GB of data from them.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#108
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the mirror is from a spy satellite, but the chassis and electronics are all NASA.

This is true. The telescope is much more than just the primary mirror. Roman has two science instruments, a wide-field imager (“WFI”) and a coronagraph (“CGI”) and they were both built by NASA for this purpose (optics, electronics, detectors, deformable mirrors). The WFI optics includes filters and a prism and grism for spectroscopy, and of course the very large CCD arrays. The coronagraph is a rather special tech de…

BTW, any idea what happened to the second mirror? IIRC NASA got 2 initially.

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#109
post #96

I will never understand why NASA doesn't build at least two copies of expensive space telescopes like this. One single launch failure and boom (literally), the entire project is a failure? It wouldn't double the cost assuming they do it with even a modicum of efficiency and intelligence. And hey - assuming that the launch goes smoothly, you can get double the benefit

I worked briefly in a satellite lab, and we did indeed have duplicate parts for most things. Any space telescope with a mirror, is a different story, e.g. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/webbs-mirrors/ The RST has an 8ft mirror. The mirrors have to be ground and polished in a clean room to tolerances that are the highest in the world. I vaguely recall it's a square law or worse - for radius-to-time-to-polish. S…

NRO donated 2 of these mirrors to NASA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

Re: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

#110
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose we should be grateful he didn’t force his own name at the last minute. I suppose he still has time.

Well, after this week, it would actually be 'The America Telescope' wouldn't it?

Naming something “America” is only for geography. He thinks anything man made should be named after him. He’s humble like that.
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