Three giant telescopes, many times stronger than any existing today, will allow scientists to study the processes that created the cosmos.
Scientist Bill Hubler monitors the polishing of a mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. The telescope's 80-foot-diameter light-gathering area will dwarf today's largest telescopes. (Ray Bertram / Steward Observatory / November 23, 2009) Reporting from Tucson - If there were a Guinness world record for making telescope mirrors, Dean Ketelsen would likely win it. Colleagues boast that the onetime Iowa farm boy has ground and polished more square footage of optics than any human being alive. "It used to be a mysterious thing that hunch-backed people in white coats did," the 55-year-old technician said while taking a break at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. "Now we use machines to grind the glass. They've taken a lot of the black arts out of it." Maybe so. But Ketelsen can't help being as proud as a soccer parent of his latest achievement. Resting behind him in the laboratory under the university's football stadium was the first of seven huge mirrors being made for the Giant Magellan Telescope. One of a new generation of super-large, ground-based telescopes being constructed around the world, the Giant Magellan's 80-foot-diameter light-gathering area will dwarf the largest telescopes in the world.
Scientist Bill Hubler monitors the polishing of a mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. The telescope's 80-foot-diameter light-gathering area will dwarf today's largest telescopes. (Ray Bertram / Steward Observatory / November 23, 2009)
Reporting from Tucson - If there were a Guinness world record for making telescope mirrors, Dean Ketelsen would likely win it. Colleagues boast that the onetime Iowa farm boy has ground and polished more square footage of optics than any human being alive. "It used to be a mysterious thing that hunch-backed people in white coats did," the 55-year-old technician said while taking a break at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab. "Now we use machines to grind the glass. They've taken a lot of the black arts out of it."
Maybe so. But Ketelsen can't help being as proud as a soccer parent of his latest achievement. Resting behind him in the laboratory under the university's football stadium was the first of seven huge mirrors being made for the Giant Magellan Telescope. One of a new generation of super-large, ground-based telescopes being constructed around the world, the Giant Magellan's 80-foot-diameter light-gathering area will dwarf the largest telescopes in the world.
In the early '70s I hired a post-doc to analyze the optical chain of a product belonging to the company for which I was working. He did a great job technically, showing a first order design problem in the folded optics chain the resolution of which, unfortunately, was not economically feasible. Having been the interface and having written the report, I got the "credit" for killing the product line. :-) As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
ALMA First Fringes at Chajnantor
A team of astronomers and engineers at ALMA have made interferometric measurements of radio signals from an astronomical source from the observatory's "high site", which is at an altitude of 5000 meters. These observations used the full suite of the production equipment that has been developed for ALMA, including two high-precision 12-meter diameter antennas and sophisticated electronic systems for receiving and correlating the signals. This is the first time that all these complex items, almost all of which are at the leading edge of technology, have been used together as a complete system. AOS (Array Operations Site) Interferometer© ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Alvaro Quintana and Jose Olivares (ALMA)
A team of astronomers and engineers at ALMA have made interferometric measurements of radio signals from an astronomical source from the observatory's "high site", which is at an altitude of 5000 meters. These observations used the full suite of the production equipment that has been developed for ALMA, including two high-precision 12-meter diameter antennas and sophisticated electronic systems for receiving and correlating the signals. This is the first time that all these complex items, almost all of which are at the leading edge of technology, have been used together as a complete system.
AOS (Array Operations Site) Interferometer© ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Alvaro Quintana and Jose Olivares (ALMA)
Submillimetric astronomy may not make as pretty pictures as optical astronomy, but it is scientifically important too !
(And one of the people working on the project is my father, too...) Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
Chatacama desert, the driest air you can find, at an altitude of 5000 m... Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
driest air you can find, at an altitude of 5000 m
Another benefit of Chili is that there is only the Pacific ocean upwind, so there is very little turbulence in the air above the telescopes. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
