James Webb telescope gets help
Published by marco on
The article NASA launches new mission to get the most out of the James Webb Space Telescope by Stephen Clark (Ars Technica) describes something really neat[1] but the thing that drew my attention was a more politically oriented comment at the end of the article.
““It’s been very, very challenging to try and squeeze this big amount of science into this small cost box, but that’s kind of what makes it fun, right?” Barclay told Ars. “We have to be pretty ruthless in making sure that we only fund the things we need to fund. We accept risk where we need to accept the risk, and at times we need to accept that we may need to give up performance in order to make sure that we hit the schedule and we hit the launch [schedule].””
Imagine this statement coming from the mouth of a military contractor. The incentives are completely different for scientists and military. See the article about the over $1T that has flowed into the F-35 program and the returns on it.
These vastly unequal incentives and rewards are perfectly encapsulated by one of my favorite stickers of all time. 25 years after I first bought it—and 46 years after it was printed—it still describes all you need to know about the U.S., or any authoritarian, militaristic country.
The Air Force should have to hold bake sales to raise money
“it will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber”
[1]
The problem is that:
“When a planet passes in front of its parent star, some of the starlight shines through its atmosphere. Webb has the sensitivity to detect the filtered starlight and break it apart into its spectral components, telling astronomers about the composition of clouds and hazes in the planet’s atmosphere.”
But Webb can’t guarantee that the detected elements really are coming from the planet itself, so that’s where Pandora comes in. Where viewing time on Webb is too precious to have it stare at something for 24 hours, Pandora can focus on planetary objects for stretches of time long enough to be able to verify sources of spectral components.
↩“Pandora will point and stare at 20 preselected exoplanets 10 times during its one-year prime mission, collecting 24 hours of visible and infrared observations with each visit. This will capture short-term and longer-term changes in each star’s behavior. SpaceX launched Pandora into a so-called “twilight orbit” that follows the boundary between day and night on Earth, allowing the satellite to keep its solar panels illuminated by the Sun while performing its observations.
““We can send this small telescope out, sit on a star for a really long time, and sort of map all the star spots, and really disentangle the star and planet signals,” Quintana said in a recent panel discussion at NASA Goddard. “It’s filling a really nice gap in helping us to sort of calibrate all these stars that James Webb is going to look at, so we can be really confident that all of these molecules that we’re detecting in planets are real.””