Comments on: Briefs: NM spaceport legislation update, Lick letter

By: Fred Willett

Fred Willett — Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:49:02 +0000

A good read is “How I killed Pluto and why it had it coming” by Mike Brown.
In it he tells how much of his work finding Kupier belt bodies was done on smaller neglected telescopes.
No telescope is too small for good science. You just need to be creative.

By: Hiram

Hiram — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 22:07:13 +0000

The decision to end funding of Lick is noteworthy, and there are other moderate capability observatories whose support is similarly debatable. But even aside from sentimental and historical reasons, there are good arguments against its closure. One, which is noted by Fillipenko, is that the mega observatories that are eating most of the available funding are available to individual researchers and students for maybe a couple of nights a year, at best. There are also many programs that such infrequent access simply can’t serve. Kinematic monitoring for exoplanet detection, for example, and testing and validation of experimental instrumentation. A common argument for keeping such observatories active is for educational purposes, as in situ training grounds for future generations of astronomers. Perhaps sadly, however, that’s a somewhat dated argument, as most cutting edge research is done at a distance, whether from autonomously operated space telescopes or from remote sites, which may be in an office on the other side of the Earth.

It’s sort of like saying that you can’t do anything anymore with suborbital launches, now that we have access to orbiting platforms. Or that you might as well shut down small launchers once we have SLS.

By: amightywind

amightywind — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 18:46:20 +0000

I’m sorry New Mexico taxpayers that you are being robbed by the Kleptocracy. You get the government you deserve.

Big Sister is right to close Lick. Turn it into a museum, or sell it to Google.

By: Vladislaw

Vladislaw — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 14:55:03 +0000

Well it looks likes the people’s representatives have spoken on the space port issue and it seems they want to move forward to the future and not the past. Good to see this.