Radical Antarctic telescope "would outdo Hubble"
A novel Antarctic telescope with 16-m diameter mirrors would far outperform the Hubble Space Telescope, and could be built at a tiny fraction of its cost, says a scientist from the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, Australia.
Tests by a team from the University of New South Wales, reported in the journal 鈥楴ature鈥� this week [16 September], show that the 鈥楧ome C鈥� site in the Australian Antarctic Territory is by far the best place ever tested on Earth for doing infrared and optical astronomy.
鈥淎 telescope there would perform as well as a much larger one anywhere else on Earth. It鈥檚 nearly as good as being in space鈥�, said Dr. Will Saunders of the Anglo-Australian Observatory.
At the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in Glasgow in June, Dr. Saunders presented a concept for an unusual telescope that鈥檚 well matched to the special conditions at Dome C, both in its optical design and in the way it鈥檚 built.
It looks nothing like other telescopes. Much of it could be built of 鈥榠cecrete鈥欌�搒now compressed to form blocks as hard as concrete鈥搘hile its mirrors could be made of the glass used for office windows.
Under the superb atmospheric conditions at Dome C this simple telescope could make razor-sharp images of large areas of sky.
Dr. Saunders estimates that his design would cost about a fifth as much as one of the extremely large telescopes now being planned. These have mirrors 30-100 m in diameter and price tags of US$700 million and up. The Hubble Space Telescope cost a few times more: about US$2.2 billion at launch.
鈥淲ith this simple telescope you could do the exquisite imaging that the extremely large telescopes plan to do, at a fraction of their cost鈥� Dr. Saunders said. 鈥淏ut, unlike them, this telescope would also be a great survey instrument, able to map the whole sky with Hubble-like clarity.鈥�
Source: Anglo-Australian Observatory
