[ExI] The Thirty Meter Telescope is now officially dead

[John Clark]

On Sun, Dec 22, 2019 at 6:53 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> What do I know?  Hah.  But wouldn't it be far more simple to put a
> telescope in orbit around the Moon?
>

The ideal place for a space telescope is L2, the second Lagrange point 1.5
million kilometers from the earth, that's because both the Earth and the Sun
are very hot compared to empty space and at that point the earth and the
sun are always in the same position so the satellite can have a large
stationary heat shield to keep the telescope in shadow and thus keep it
very cold without any mechanical refrigeration needed. You need the
telescope to be cold if it's to detect infrared light from the most distant
parts of the universe, and from there even ultraviolet light has been
red-shifted into the infrared. L2 is where the James Webb telescope is
going to go if the damn thing ever gets off the ground.

John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20191223/a1a9a3a6/attachment.htm>