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SpaceNut

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

It looks like we have another victum of the 2007 budget process...

[url=http://starbulletin.com/2006/02/09/news/story01.html]Budget ax looms over telescopes
A NASA proposal cutting funds for a project on Mauna Kea has isle astronomers concerned [/url]

Funding for the Keck Outrigger Telescope project on Mauna Kea has been eliminated from NASA's draft 2007 budget, possibly killing the $50 million, four-telescope project

NASA draft budget eliminates new Keck telescopes

SpaceNut

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

The battle over the sacred mountain top for putting a telescope seems to be over for a Thirty Meter Telescope project.
Giant – and controversial – telescope to be built on sacred Hawaiian peak

SpaceNut

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

After more than five months of protests over construction of a giant telescope on land some native Hawaiians consider sacred, Native Hawaiian activists prevented the construction from moving ahead last year by blocking the road to the mountaintop.

They say Mauna Kea’s summit is sacred and the new observatory will further defile the site, which already hosts several telescopes built in recent decades. Mauna Kea telescope construction probably won’t resume until 2021. Construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea will not begin this year, Wednesday marks exactly one year since Thirty Meter Telescope opponents blocked access to construction sites atop Mauna Kea on Hawaii Island. Wednesday,

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launch date finally set
https://newatlas.com/space/james-webb-s … unch-date/
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will be launched on December 18th, 2021.

NASA shares footage of mysterious and 'incredibly rare' brown dwarf
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech … dwarf.html

The Extremely Large Telescope also known as ELT is ESO's project, an astronomical observatory currently under construction. Part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) agency, located on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile.
Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is a ground-based extremely large telescope under construction in the same area of Chile. The $1 billion project is led by the United States in partnership with Australia, Brazil, and South Korea, with Chile as the host country. The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is an already functional telescope facility in Chile operated by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert. Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is an under construction extremely large telescope (ELT) that has become controversial due to its planned location on Mauna Kea I'm not sure of the culture history or politics but I think the mountain or site might be near one of the more sacred or historical sites, science people and engineer people who deal with numbers and facts tend to ignore a lot of religious and folklore history so unfortunately the whole thing has grown into a serious political issue with the Hawaiian sovereignty supporters blocking the access roads to Mauna Kea and demonstrating against the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope. The lockdowns with the Corona virus caused more delays Hawaii might be in full lockdown with the COVID-19 pandemic or mutant variations of the virus may add more costs.

There might be huge radio telescopes, Green Bank Telescope is already 100 meters in diameter! The Arecibo which has now collapsed was about 1000feet but could not be turned, the Chinese have massive plans for radio. The Chinese telesceope is 500 meter or 1,640 feet
https://fast.bao.ac.cn/
It is the world's largest filled-aperture radio telescope and the second-largest single-dish aperture, after the sparsely-filled RATAN-600 in Russia.
The Chinese telescope is new and made its first discovery, of two new pulsars, in August 2017 the telescope appeared in the episode "The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth" of the television series Cosmos: Possible Worlds presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Some people predict 'feats' in the next few decades like China 3D-printing a giant telescope on the Moon ...but maybe that sounds like scifi speculation rather than fact?

Dark Matter Sat Telescope?
http://www.news.cn/english/2021-09/08/c_1310175708.htm
"China releases first batch of gamma photon data from dark matter explorer"

Dream About the Future of Big Telescopes; Monster Space Telescopes That Could Fly by the 2030s
https://www.universetoday.com/139100/dr … the-2030s/
Large Ultraviolet/Optical/Infrared Surveyor, Origins Space Telescope (OST), HabEx this telescope would also directly image planetary systems to analyze the composition of planets' atmospheres with a large segmented mirror. Lynx Using an X-ray microcalorimeter imaging spectrometer, this space telescope will detect X-rays coming from Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) at the center of the earliest galaxies in the Universe.

Gravity waves and a Space-based gravitational wave observatory from the ESA?
http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Image … e_Universe
Euclid, is another European mission launching in the future – to study Visible and near-infrared space observatory mission focused on dark matter and dark energy.
Solar Orbiter en route is a mission wokring with NASA, launched from Cape Canaveral, it will take approximately 3.5 years, using repeated gravity assists from Earth and Venus, to reach its operational orbit.

After more than five months of protests over construction of a giant telescope on land some native Hawaiians consider sacred, Native Hawaiian activists prevented the construction from moving ahead last year by blocking the road to the mountaintop.

They say Mauna Kea’s summit is sacred and the new observatory will further defile the site, which already hosts several telescopes built in recent decades. Mauna Kea telescope construction probably won’t resume until 2021. Construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea will not begin this year, Wednesday marks exactly one year since Thirty Meter Telescope opponents blocked access to construction sites atop Mauna Kea on Hawaii Island. Wednesday

Do most people who enter politics and admin and bureaucratic systems just play politics, do they play the games of left vs right or do they go to public service and wish to make places like Hawaii a better place?

Native Religion vs the Euro Ecologistas?

Spain judge nixes backup site for disputed Hawaii telescope

https://www.stltoday.com/news/national/ … 548ab.html

State legislators ask Department of Hawaiian Homelands to enter into agreement with Mauna Kea protectors
https://www.kitv.com/story/44667904/sta … protectors

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2021-09-09 04:04:27)

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

China eyes Qinghai-Tibet Plateau site for new radio astronomy observatory

http://www.china.org.cn/china/Off_the_W … 072318.htm

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

The telescope Lynx, a proposed space telescope that would uncover the "invisible" universe by detecting high-energy X-ray radiationThe Telescopes of the Future, and What is perhaps going to be funded and built and what Sights and Info you can See Through future Scopes. The LUVOIR's mirror would be more than six times wider than the one in Hubble. The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is a ground-based extremely large telescope under construction, as part of the Extremely Large Telescope Program (US-ELTP), as of 2022 the US$1 billion project is US-led in partnership with Australia, Brazil, and South Korea, with Chile as the host country.  Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope aka FAST nicknamed Tianyan "Sky's/Heaven's Eye" is a radio telescope located in the Dawodang depression in a natural basin in Pingtang County, Guizhou, southwest China. Athena was selected as the mission for the 2nd Large mission opportunity, satisfying the Cosmic Vision theme the "Hot and Energetic Universe". SMILE is a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) with contribution from the Canadian Space Agency and other Canadian institutions. SMILE will image for the first time in soft X-rays and EUV up to 40 hours per orbit continously, improving our understanding of the dynamic interaction between the solar wind and with the Earth's magnetosphere. Euclid is European a space-borne survey mission dedicated to investigate the origin of the Universe's accelerating expansion and the nature of dark energy, dark matter and gravity. Ariel an ESA mission is the first space mission dedicated to measuring the chemical composition and thermal structures of a large well constructed sample of transiting and eclipsing exoplanets, enabling planetary science far beyond the boundaries of the Solar System. The LISA project started out as a joint effort between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). However, in 2011, NASA announced that it would be unable to continue its LISA partnership with the European Space Agency due to funding limitations. The project is a recognized CERN experiment (RE8). A scaled down design initially known as the New Gravitational-wave Observatory (NGO) was proposed as one of three large projects in ESA's long term plans 'LISA will be a large-scale space mission designed to detect one of the most elusive phenomena in astronomy - gravitational waves. With LISA we will be able to observe the entire universe directly with gravitational waves, learning about the formation of structure and galaxies, stellar evolution, the early universe, and the structure and nature of spacetime itself.'
https://www.lisamission.org/
Another telescope named Plato?
PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) is a space telescope under development by the European Space Agency. The mission goals are to search for planetary transits across up to one million stars, and to discover and characterize rocky extrasolar planets around yellow dwarf stars (like our sun), subgiant stars, and red dwarf stars.
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-plato-spa … anets.html

How NASA's Roman telescope could help find Earth-like planets by surveying space dust
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-nasa-roma … anets.html

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-03-19 09:20:12)

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

NASA Budget: FY22 Outcomes and FY23 Request

https://www.aip.org/fyi/2022/nasa-budge … 23-request

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

Earth 2.0? China joins the race to find the most Earth-like habitable exoplanet
https://interestingengineering.com/chin … net-search

ESA has adopted PLATO in the Science Programme, which means that the mission can move from a blueprint into construction. PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) is a space telescope under development by the European Space Agency for launch in 2026.The mission goals are to search for planetary transits across up to one million stars, and to discover and characterize rocky extrasolar planets around yellow dwarf stars (like our sun), subgiant stars, and red dwarf stars. The design of the Telescope Optical Units is made by an international team from Italy, Switzerland and Sweden and coordinated by Roberto Ragazzoni at INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica) Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova. The Telescope Optical Unit development is funded by the Italian Space Agency, the Swiss Space Office and the Swedish National Space Board.
http://www.oact.inaf.it/plato/PPLC/PLAT … UnitS.html
The Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL) is a space telescope and the fourth medium-class mission of the European Space Agency's Cosmic Vision programme. The mission is aimed at observing at least 1000 known exoplanets using the transit method, studying and characterising the planets' chemical composition and thermal structures. Compared to the James Webb Space Telescope, ARIEL will have more observing time available for planet characterisation but a much smaller telescope and it will be launched almost a decade later. ARIEL is expected to be launched in 2029 aboard an Arianespace Ariane 6 together with the Comet Interceptor.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190421085 … -releases/

Euclid is a medium-class ("M-class") mission and is part of the Cosmic Vision campaign of ESA's Science Programme. This class of missions have an ESA budget cap at around €500 million. Euclid was chosen in October 2011 together with Solar Orbiter, out of several competing missions.[9] Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the launch was scheduled on a Soyuz ST 2-1b in 2023, but Euclid will instead be launched on an Ariane 62
https://www.cieletespace.fr/actualites/ … r-ariane-6

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-05-03 15:19:25)

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

Will LISA see the gravity waves 10 picoseconds after the Big Bang

https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Phas … s_999.html

The early universe may chirp about unknown physics. A University of Helsinki research team has demonstrated how an early universe phase transition will lead to gravitational wave signals potentially visible in the upcoming satellite missions. The research results were recently published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters.

Phase transitions, such as the boiling of water or the melting of a metal, are commonplace but fascinating phenomena that spur surprises decades after decades. They often occur as the temperature of a substance is changed, through the nucleation of bubbles of the new phase which then expands. In the end, the new phase has taken over the whole container.

The early universe was composed of a hot plasma whose temperature decreased as the universe expanded. It is speculated by many physicists that a phase transition may have occurred soon after the Big Bang. This would then had lead to nucleation of bubbles and their subsequent collisions.

Such collisions would create powerful ripples in spacetime which could be observed in planned gravitational wave detectors. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), with a provisional launch date in 2037, is one such probe that may be able to detect these early Universe spacetime ripples.

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

'We have big plans for Athena to cooperate with ESA’s LISA mission. Together, the duo could unveil new clues about distant and merging BlackHoles, powerful quasars, rapid jets believed to be produced around spinning black holes, & more'

https://twitter.com/esascience/status/1 … 1988413440

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

NASA's costly SOFIA telescope has reached its end. But its legacy lives on
https://interestingengineering.com/nasa … pe-retired

Costly SOFIA telescope faces termination after years of problems
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01213-0

A space telescope could reveal a black hole's photon ring

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-space-tel … -hole.html

Press conference at ESO on groundbreaking Milky Way results from the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann22006/

Singularity Black holes play eerie music in these NASA 'sonifications'
black hole sounds NASA releases audio recorded by its Chandra X-ray observatory
https://news.yahoo.com/black-holes-play … 55235.html

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-05-08 05:53:22)

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

ESA conducts first tests of exoplanet hunter Plato in space-like conditions
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-esa-exopl … -like.html

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

Plato’s cave: vacuum test for exoplanet detection
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Imag … _detection
PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) under development by the European Space Agency for launch in 2026

Different to Gaia it has Wavelength of Visible spectrum 500 to 1,000 nm

Plato will study relatively bright stars (between magnitudes 4 and 11), enabling a more accurate determination of planetary parameters and allowing follow up ground observation.

Plato PDF
https://sci.esa.int/documents/33240/360 … rt_1_2.pdf
space observatory is planned to launch in 2026 to the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point

Euclid gains solar power and protection
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Imag … protection

Instruments
    VIS, a camera operating at visible wavelengths (550–920 nm) made of a mosaic of 6 × 6 e2v Charge Coupled Detectors, containing 600 million pixels, allows measurement of the deformation of galaxies
    NISP, a camera composed of a mosaic of 4 × 4 Teledyne H2RG detectors sensitive to near-infrared light radiation (1000–2000 nm) with 65 million pixels to provide low precision measurements of redshifts, and thus distances, of over a billion galaxies from multi-color (3-filter (Y, J and H)) photometry (photometric redshift technique); and
    use a slitless spectrometer to analyse the spectrum of light in near-infrared (1000–2000 nm), to acquire precise redshifts and distances of million galaxies, with an accuracy 10 times better than photometric redshifts, and to determine the baryon acoustic oscillations.

This is a visible to near-infrared space telescope currently under development by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Euclid Consortium. The objective of the Euclid mission is to better understand dark energy and dark matter by accurately measuring the acceleration of the universe.

Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the launch was scheduled on a Soyuz ST 2-1b in 2023, but Euclid will instead be launched on an Ariane 62.

Spanish language news.

NASA has also appointed 40 American scientists to be part of the Euclid consortium, which will develop the instruments and analyse the data generated by the mission. Currently, this consortium brings together more than 1000 scientists from 13 European countries and the United States.
http://www.esa.int/Space_in_Member_Stat … l_Universo

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

The World's Largest Liquid-Mirror Telescope Comes Online

https://www.universetoday.com/156246/th … es-online/

Like other observatories, the ILMT is located high above sea level to minimize the distortion caused by atmospheric water vapor (a phenomenon known as atmospheric refraction). Much like the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile or the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii, the ILMT telescope is part of the Devasthal Observatory located in the remote mountains of Uttarakhand province in Northern India (west of Nepal). The telescope is designed to survey the sky and identify objects like supernovae, gravitational lenses, space debris, asteroids, and other transient and variable phenomena.

Dr. Paul Hickson, a UBC Physics and Astronomy Professor and a liquid mirror technology pioneer, has been perfecting the technology over the years at the Large Zenith Telescope (LZT). Located at UBC’s Malcolm Knapp Research Forest east of Vancouver, B.C., the LZT was the largest liquid-metal mirror before the ILMT was commissioned. Because of their expertise, Dr. Hickson and his colleagues played a pivotal role in designing and creating the ILMT air system. The facility gathered its first light this past May and will temporarily cease operations in October due to India’s monsoon season.

While it may sound like something out of science fiction, the basics of this technology are quite simple. The technology comes down to three components, including a dish containing a reflecting liquid (like mercury), a rotating section the Liquid Mirror (LM) sits atop (powered by air compressors), and a drive system. When powered up, the LM takes advantage of the fact that the rotational force causes the mirror to take on a parabolic shape, which is ideal for focusing light. Meanwhile, the liquid mercury is protected by an extremely thin layer of optical-quality mylar that prevents small waves from forming (due to wind or the rotation).

Liquid mercury provides a low-cost alternative to glass mirrors, which are very heavy and expensive to produce.

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-06-13 08:24:25)

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

Roman Space Telescope top challenge for new NASA astrophysics director

https://spacenews.com/roman-space-teles … -director/

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

More on the Mauna Kea protests, a number of Hollywood Rockstar Rapper celebrity have also gone on social media platforms to voice their support publicly for the protest  controversy has led to considerable division in the Hawaii community with residents choosing support or opposition.

A new law is putting astronomy back in the hands of Native Hawaiians. It's a huge first step in Native Hawaiians' fight to regain stewardship of Mauna Kea, the planned site for the Thirty Meter Telescope.

https://www.popsci.com/science/hawaii-p … y-control/

    (The new law) also establishes the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority, an 11-member voting group that will now have majority authority over how the land is managed.

    the law includes that the group must include one member who is a “lineal descendant” of a practitioner of Native Hawaiian traditions associated with the mountain, and another who is currently a recognized practitioner of those Native Hawaiian traditional practices.

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

New 3D cosmic map reveals 1 million previously hidden galaxies

https://www.space.com/map-galaxies-hidd … nic-clouds

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

ESA scaling back design of X-ray astronomy mission

https://spacenews.com/esa-scaling-back- … y-mission/

WASHINGTON — Faced within increasing costs, the European Space Agency is looking for ways to revise the design of a large X-ray space telescope, an effort that could have implications for NASA’s own astrophysics programs.

ESA selected the Athena mission in 2014 as one of two flagship astrophysics missions, along with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Athena — a name derived from Advanced Telescope for High-Energy Astrophysics — would launch by the mid-2030s to study supermassive black holes, supernova explosions and other sources of X-rays using a large X-ray mirror.

At the time of selection, each mission has an estimated cost to ESA of 1.05 billion euros ($1.07 billion), or about 1.17 billion euros today, said Paul McNamara, ESA astronomy and astrophysics coordinator, during a July 21 presentation to NASA’s astronomy and astrophysics committee. By 2019, though, the combined price of Athena and LISA had grown to 2.5 billion euros.

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

Chinese Xuntian Space Telescope to unravel cosmic mysteries in 2023
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-05-06/C … index.html

JWST and the future of large space telescopes - The Space Review
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4420/1

Will Brazil do something?

Virgin Orbit Formally Establishes New Brazilian Subsidiary and Receives Operator’s License for Launch Operations in Alcântara
https://spacechannel.com/virgin-orbit-f … alcantara/

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

its back after almost getting cancelled

NASA awards LISA mission laser instrument contract
https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/NASA … t_999.html

NASA is in the technology development and study phase of the mission and will be contributing hardware as part of an agreement with ESA. LISA consists of three spacecraft arranged in a triangle and separated by millions of miles, trailing tens of millions of miles, more than one hundred times the distance to the Moon, behind Earth as it orbits the Sun.

These three spacecraft will relay continuous laser beams back and forth to detect gravitational wave signatures that come from distortions of spacetime. This contract pertains to the LPS used for frequency stabilizing the laser.

We have a few fringe Gravity Wave topics on newmars, Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is a proposed space probe to detect and accurately measure gravitational waves—tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime—from astronomical sources
https://web.archive.org/web/20131205035 … s-contacts

Potential sources for signals are merging massive black holes at the centre of galaxies, massive black holes orbited by small compact objects, known as extreme mass ratio inspirals, binaries of compact stars in our Galaxy, and possibly other sources of cosmological origin, such as the very early phase of the Big Bang, and speculative astrophysical objects like cosmic strings and domain boundaries.

LISA will be sensitive to the stochastic gravitational wave background generated in the early universe through various channels, including inflation, first order phase transitions related to spontaneous symmetry breaking, and cosmic strings. LISA will also search for currently unknown (and unmodelled) sources of gravitational waves. The history of astrophysics has shown that whenever a new frequency range/medium of detection is available new unexpected sources show up. This could for example include kinks and cusps in cosmic strings.
PDF
https://www.elisascience.org/files/publ … 170120.pdf

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-09-05 17:26:55)

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

Could one of the biggest puzzles in astrophysics be solved by reworking Albert Einstein's theory of gravity? A new study co-authored by NASA scientists says not yet.

Scientists help probe dark energy by testing gravity
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-scientist … avity.html
The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, and scientists don't know why. This phenomenon seems to contradict everything researchers understand about gravity's effect on the cosmos: It's as if you threw an apple in the air and it continued upward, faster and faster. The cause of the acceleration, dubbed dark energy, remains a mystery.

A new study from the international Dark Energy Survey, using the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile, marks the latest effort to determine whether this is all simply a misunderstanding: that expectations for how gravity works at the scale of the entire universe are flawed or incomplete. This potential misunderstanding might help scientists explain dark energy. But the study—one of the most precise tests yet of Albert Einstein's theory of gravity at cosmic scales—finds that the current understanding still appears to be correct.

The study finds Einstein's theory still works. So no explanation for dark energy yet. But this research will feed into two upcoming missions: ESA's Euclid mission, slated for launch no earlier than 2023, which has contributions from NASA; and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, targeted for launch no later than May 2027. Both telescopes will search for changes in the strength of gravity over time or distance.

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

Voyage 2050
https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/voyage-2050/white-papers
Long-term planning of the ESA Science Programme

Gaia
A protogalaxy in the Milky Way may be our galaxy’s original nucleus
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mil … rotogalaxy
A population of stars at the galactic center is the oldest known in the galaxy, a study finds

Mars_B4_Moon

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TransAstra and Celestron to modify telescopes for spaceflight

https://spacenews.com/transastra-celestron-telescopes/

Trans Astronautica Corp. announced an agreement Sept. 27 with telescope manufacturer Celestron to develop a space-qualified version of the company’s Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph (RASA) ground-based telescope.

“We’ve been using Celestron’s RASA telescopes in our space domain awareness and asteroid prospecting systems, and we found them to be very affordable, high-quality optical systems,” Joel Sercel, TransAstra founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “We looked at the designs and we realized it would not be that hard to adapt them for space use.”

Over the next year, TransAstra plans to modify the RASA telescope design and substitute materials to produce a telescope that can withstand radiation exposure, temperature swings, and the vibration and shock loads of space launch.

Mars_B4_Moon

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

Maybe some day a Radio Telescope on the Moon

There is the  Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, Mojave Desert, the Ratan in Russia,  Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England,  Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope near Bonn, Germany, another giant Radio Telescope in Xinjiang, China, FAST has a 500 m (1,600 ft) diameter dish constructed in a natural depression in the Chinese landscape, Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, arrays or groups of several radio antennas observing together creating — in effect — a single telescope many miles across and NASA Deep Space Network (DSN)  in Spain and Australia that supports NASA's interplanetary spacecraft missions.

but for now

Renowned Arecibo telescope won’t be rebuilt — and astronomers are heartbroken
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03293-4

tahanson43206

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Re: Planned Earthly or Space Telescopes - from any nation

For Mars_B4_Moon re #49 about a Radio Telescope on the Moon

Very recently, someone (possibly you?) posted a report about an interesting idea (from China, as I recall) to set a group of satellites into orbit around the Moon, to perform radio astronomy.  Unfortunately, the idea was posted in a topic that did not include "China" or "Chinese", because I looked at all the topic titles that include those words.

I bring this up because the idea of building a radio telescope on the surface of the Moon has been in discussion for decades, and your opening statement in Post #49 is reinforcement for that idea.

The satellite concept would (most likely) cost a great deal less.  It ** would ** require sophisticated coordination between the satellites, but I understand such coordination is routine for modern arrays of scientific satellites in Earth orbit.

In any case, I would expect a satellite radio telescope to be in operation at the Moon long before anyone actually attempts such a device on the surface.

A young gent earned a PhD in electronics engineering at a nearby university, and returned to his native Australia, where he is a part of the team building a very sophisticated radio telescope array there.

I asked Google for assistance, and it  came back with this:

Where is the largest telescope in Australia?
Hosted at CSIRO's Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, it will initially comprise more than 130,000 antennas spread over 65 kilometres in remote Western Australia.
Australia affirms role in world's largest telescope - Minister for Industry
www.minister.industry.gov.au › ministers › karenandrews › media-releases

The young gent I mentioned has been involved in design and assembly of computer devices for this project. He assisted another PhD candidate in design, construction and operation of an all-sky telescope. That device is still in operation.  It proved the theory that modern computer equipment would be able to observe signals coming in from a large cone of sky and form "beams" from various objects by recording the time-of-arrival of waves detected by multiple spiral antennas laid out in a flat grid. 

(th)