• gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    3 hours ago

    Honestly astronomy from earth is notoriously difficult, for various reasons.

    • there’s already a lot of light pollution, due to atmospheric light dispersion, so finding a good spot for telescopes is already difficult.
    • there’s the issue that images become blurred, again because atmosphere.
    • We already have telescopes in space, why no re-use them with an additional camera?

    Spaceflight is unstoppable at this point. I look at the colonization of Mars like a distillation process: we remove all of the restless assholes and billionaires from Earth, and they leave us and leave us the fuck alone. That’s a good thing; We should support it.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      edit-2
      3 hours ago

      Honestly astronomy from space is notoriously difficult, for various reasons.

      • It takes a lot of energy and infrastructure to propel a telescope into space.
      • Radiation can cause issues with electronics, so they all need to be hardened.
      • Typically satellites use older proven technology to make sure that they don’t run into new issues, which means they’re not able to be bleeding edge.
      • New technology is next to impossible to add to a space telescope, meaning upgrades rarely happen, if ever. Ground telescopes can continuously upgrade with relative ease.

      There’s a lot of pros and cons. Neither solution is better than the other. They’re only better at certain things. We need both.

    • CouncilOfFriends@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      3 hours ago

      The problem is radio wavelengths are much longer than visible light thus the huge size of radio telescopes on earth, which would also make a space-based one a challenge