111–115 of 115 posts
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
what if both of them blow up?
Bon Voyage, RST!
The data, up to 1.4TB/day raw compressed, is planned to be fully open, every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo. You can just download it and start looking for Rama or Oumuamua or plan your exoplanetary real estate empire or make a really big sandbox game. I at least want somebody to make me a cool screen saver. You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy. I wonder how much spac…
My favorite part about this is that since names are largely a social construct, given the right situation, we could just nullify all the paid names and start again.
Sure, whoever does this will lose a lot of credibility. But say a disliked president signs an order forcing his country to stop accepting names that were paid, it only takes nobody reinstating it. And the rest of the world also giving up on the names, of course.
So you can totally fund space exploration this way, and then society can decide that it sucked and nullify it after the buyer is dead and unable to protest. I guess the family could, but...
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you! From talking to a contact working with JWST, it sounds a bit trickier in practice. The data are public, but with Roman the idea is that you must process them on their computers rather than download everything locally, and you pay for the compute/storage you use.
that's horrifying! what if you want to work on the processing algorithms themselves? can't you access the raw input data?
unfortunate name
FromWikipedia: It is named after former NASA chief of astronomy Nancy Grace Roman.
also relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace