Category Archives: Hubble Telescope

When did it become acceptable for companies to expect us to pay good money for devices with fundamental flaws?

The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is now the companys third high-end smartphone in four years to arrive with significant issues either prior to launch or immediately following. In the case of the Galaxy S20 Ultra, its the phones much vaunted quadruple rear cameras. While those lenses produce some impressive shots, there are some equally maddening flaws with the S20 Ultras cameras most notably issues with autofocusing when capturing both video and still images.

While the S20s focusing issue is the worst since the Hubble telescope, at least this time it doesnt appear to be a hardware problem, and Samsung is promising a fix. However, its unclear if that update will arrive before the new Galaxy S20 models arrive in stores March 6.

Samsungs other oopsies in recent years have included the Galaxy Fold and its easy-to-damage folding screen and the Galaxy Note 7 and its explosive battery. (The latter problem appeared once the Note 7 was in shoppers hands and proved so significant that Samsung had to recall that phablet and ultimately scrap the entire release.)

While Samsung has had its share of pricey products that shipped before they were ready, it isnt the only company to make this mistake. Apple was able to make super-slim MacBooks when it debuted its butterfly keyboard in 2015. Its just too bad that the keyboards could be undone by Cheeto dust. It was even worse that it took the company four years to come up with a viable solution in the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Even now, the new keyboard isnt yet on all the companys laptops.

Whats worse is that all of these products cost well north of $1,000. If Im spending $150 on the Moto G7 Power, I can tolerate it if its less than perfect. (Not for nothing, but the G7 Power has the best phone battery life, outperforming even the S20 Ultra on our test.) But if Im spending nearly ten times as muchor moreon a smartphone, such flaws are not as easily overlooked. Even more so when that smartphone is the flagship for your company.

I get and like that Samsung is being very ambitious with both the Galaxy S20 Ultra and the Fold, but when you have something thats bound to garner all sorts of scrutiny, I find it surprising that these smartphones werent subjected to every test imaginable. Samsung had to know that reviewers were going to test the hell out of the S20 Ultras camera; are you telling me no one in the company bothered to check how fast this thing focuses?

Perhaps its that these companies test their products in sanitized, Star Trek-type environments. Unfortunately, most people treat their workspace more like Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park.

Heres a modest proposal: If youre going to make a smartphone, laptop, or any other device with some awesome new featurebe it a camera, a folding screen, or a keyboard and charge consumers thousands of dollars, better make sure it works first.

Samsung - Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G...

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G -...

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G...

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The Galaxy S20 Ultra had one job and Samsung screwed it up - Tom's Guide

IN a week of startling developments in space observation and exploration, two major events stand out.

The first is the discovery of a mini-moon which is orbiting the Earth and has been since 2017, only that nobody spotted it until a fortnight ago. Minimoon is an appropriate name as the object is about the size of a car.

The second announcement was about the biggest explosion ever found by mankind, and since no one has ever seen the Big Bang, it can be safely said that this latest explosion is the biggest ever detected.

READ MORE:Turkey's lost kingdom discovered in new archaeological find

WHAT IS THE MINI MOON?

DISCOVERED on February 15 and confirmed as a mini-moon earlier this week, astronomers know very little about the object it may even be an artificial object, such as a dead satellite, but its most likely a small asteroid just 2m wide.

Found at three-quarters of the distance to the Moon, its going to miss Earth by a huge distance and will probably only be with us until April, but technically speaking it is a moon orbiting around the Earth.

Minimoon is just the second asteroid known to have been captured by Earth.

The first was given the uncharming name of 2006 RH120, and orbited around our planet between September 2006 and June 2007 before going off into the dark yonder.

READ MORE:Christina Koch sets female space record after landing

This latest object has also been given a bland name 2020 CD3. It was discovered by Kacper Wierzchos, a senior research specialist for the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona.

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatorys Minor Planet Center announced the find earlier this week.

The Center stated: Orbit integrations indicate that this object is temporarily bound to the Earth. No link to a known artificial object has been found. Further observations and dynamical studies are strongly encouraged.

AND THE BIGGEST BANG?

DONT worry it wont affect us as it happened hundreds of millions of light-years away.

The explosion was detected by a new range of radio telescopes. Astronomers and astrophysicists concluded that the blast came from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy.

According to the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, this explosion released five times more energy than the previous record holder.

Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, said the event was extraordinarily energetic.

Weve seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive, said the professor. And we dont know why its so big.

But it happened very slowly like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years.

The explosion occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, about 390 million light-years from Earth.

It was so powerful it punched a cavity in the cluster plasma the super-hot gas surrounding the black hole.

People were sceptical because the size of outburst, she said. But it really is that. The Universe is a weird place.

The scientists themselves may not be wired but they have a sense of humour. Their website address features the word "kaboom".

WHY ARE WE LEARNING MORE ABOUT SPACE?

ITS an exciting time for space exploration with discoveries occurring on an almost weekly basis.

Particularly exciting is the potential for radio telescopes, especially in large arrays such as the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia of which professor Johnston-Hollitt is the director.

Its a low-frequency radio telescope and is the first of four Square Kilometre Array (SKA) which The National recently profiled installations to be completed.

Johnston-Hollitt feels theres a lot more to come: Its a bit like archaeology.

Weve been given the tools to dig deeper with low-frequency radio telescopes so we should be able to find more outbursts like this now.

We made this discovery with Phase 1 of the MWA, when the telescope had 2048 antennas pointed towards the sky.

Were soon going to be gathering observations with 4096 antennas, which should be 10 times more sensitive.

I think thats pretty exciting.

Other than radio telescopes, the next big development will be the James Webb Space Telescope, the replacement for the Hubble Telescope which revolutionised our view of the universe.

Webb will be launched next year and is an international programme led by NASA with its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Its first job will be to look at the so-called ice giants of the Solar System, the planets Neptune and Uranus which lie beyond the orbits of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.

Leigh Fletcher, associate professor of planetary science at the University of Leicester, will lead the study of the two planets.

He said: The key thing that Webb can do that is very, very difficult to accomplish from any other facility is map their atmospheric temperature and chemical structure.

We think that the weather and climate of the ice giants are going to have a fundamentally different character compared to the gas giants. Thats partly because

theyre so far away from the Sun, theyre smaller in size and rotate slower on their axes, but also because the blend of gases and the amount of atmospheric mixing is very different compared with Jupiter and Saturn.

With Webb due to stay in service for 10 years or more, many more space discoveries will be made.

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Mini-moon and the biggest bang in space are two of the latest astronomy finds - The National

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Astronomers have revealed that dark matter forms much smaller groups than previously known. The study of astronomers was carried out using the NASA Hubble Space Telescope and a new observation technique.

Dark matter, an invisible substance, forms the temporal structure upon which galaxies are built. Basically, it is the gravitational glue that holds galaxy clusters together. Invisible matter is composed of barionic matter, which consists of electrons, protons and neutrons.

The result obtained from the study of dark matter establishes the truthfulness of one of the fundamental predictions of the widely accepted theory of cold dark matter, which says that all galaxies are formed and rooted in clouds of dark matter.

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Astronomers came to the conclusion by measuring how the light of distant quasars, the bright nuclei of very distant galaxies fed by black holes, behaves as it passes through space. The study revealed that light while traveling through space was magnified by the severity of massive foreground galaxies due to the gravitational lens, which led to the detection of groups of dark matter.

Although astronomers cannot see dark matter, they can observe its presence by noticing how its gravity affects galaxies and stars. Before the results of this study came out, the researchers, in the absence of information on small groups, had developed alternative theories, including warm dark matter. Warm dark matter says that invisible matter particles move too fast to merge and form smaller concentrations.

Get the best of News18 in your inbox: subscribe to News18 Daybreak. Follow News18.com on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok and YouTube, and stay informed about what is happening in the world around you, in real time.

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The Hubble telescope detects "smaller" groups of dark matter that contain clusters of galaxies, says NASA - The Media Hq

As Head of Innovation and Ventures Office, Frank Salzgeber is overseeing the largest Space entrepreneurship network in the world. His team has initiated over 320 industry transfers and supported over 720 start-ups. The team support the exploitation of the ESA patent portfolio and promote the ESA Business Application offer of ESA. Over 500 business have been supported and SME and industry to applied Space solutions for their business. SciTech Europa speaks to Salzgeber about ESAs approach to astrophysics, and the importance behind this.

My background is in industrial engineering; I used to work for Apple and later in my own IT start up. In 2003, ESA hired me as the Head of commercial development of human spaceflight and exploration. This involved working with astronauts and bringing the science and the commercial world together. After three years, the management moved me to another position which was as the Head of technology transfer and business incubation. What we do is bringing all the elements of research technology development, together with the non-space world. Sometimes the space world and the non-space world are in two different orbits and our job is to bring them together. I think a lot of scientific researchers have a similar approach, or at least they try to do that. On the one side you have to speak with the market and users, which is out there, and on the other side we see what we have to do you have to bridge that. Its not only good enough to make this dialogue and bring it together, sometimes you have to prove that its working; this is where we chip in on money. We support around 200 start-ups per year; 15% of these are in the UK with our partner STFC (the Science and Technology Facilities Council) and UK Space, and we support around 150 cases where industry applies the technology, services and/or applications which we have developed in space.

To be honest, the smallest part of ESA is the science part. The science part is really where they explore the universe, where stars are growing and dying etc. This is a small but important part of ESA where a fraction of the budget goes to. I think the exciting part is that we have to build our machinery in order to do the actual exploration. Take the Hubble telescope for example, this is an instrument that you have to build, and you build them on the edge of possibility in terms of technology.

The other big part that ESA are doing which may be different to other space agencies, we help industry to develop the backbone of our digital society. There are three big pillars: communication (such as satellites and 5G technologies), navigation (for instance GPS from America, and Galileo from Europe), and Earth observation. In terms of the second pillar, navigation, this is crucial because we have a generation which never gets lost besides when their phone battery runs out. You use it in your car, but you use also the time signal really managing the electrical grid. This is crucial for Europe, because you want to have a secure system and not a system which is may be manipulated by one country.

The third, started in research. This has moved really to a commercial activity, because in the past Earth observation was really rather either for military use, or it was for monitoring the Earth in terms of climate and weather. However, this has turned out to be more and more commercial. I would say that these are the three technology areas which are the backbone of our digital society future.

What the technology allows at the moment is that you can see further; you see a bigger building full of telescopes in space by our colleagues of the Directorate of Science. This is not only done by us but also with our sister organisation: the European Southern Observatory if we are looking on the ground Telescopes. We have a series of satellites and missions which are planned in the next years. There was one crazy thing which did not work, but this was one of my favourite ones, it was the idea of a start-up to create a public telescope internet orbit to allow everybody to buy airtime. What we have to see is that Space is not really governmental anymore. It has really become a normal industry, and I think this is the biggest trend.

We have also one start-up company in Germany, who was writing a software which we supported in giving airtime for public telescopes in the southern hemisphere, because you have a lot of universities which have a telescope but they have a funding problem, so they sell airtime through their telescope to private researchers or hobby researchers of the North. I really like this; with digitisation, you can really start not a shared economy, but a shared research society.

I think that this will be empowered because its the same when we are looking at maps. There is one start-up company in the Netherlands that are detecting special structures on Earth but also on Mars. It can be used as a gate to get people looking at it because sometime artificial intelligence (AI) does not pick up everything. However, if a human makes a point that that is a crater/object which looks strange, that still works better than any computer. Its really a shared research and sharing the results and bringing it back to the crowds; and that is a very nice way to do it.

When we talk about limitations of computers, a lot of people say AI will solving everything I think thats misleading. I always describe it as like when we were in the school and you were allowed to use a calculator. Everybody thought it would become easy, but actually it was becoming harder. I think this is what AI algorithms will do; a good doctor will become a better doctor, a bad doctor will not become a good doctor because of AI. Therefore, it will empower us but in a certain area, humans will be always be better. The joint working with algorithms and computers will allow us things better and brighter, and we will be able to see further in terms of what the impact is. I think that when you take a step back you will see the bigger picture, and sometimes you have to do that. I think AI will allow you to take a step back.

When you combine the data which we have with the computer capabilities we will have in the future, we will see more things because also in science and Earth observation as well as the big missions we have a lot of data which we have to manage. Last but not least, this is why a lot of people work in space, not only in ESA but also in another organisations; it is the curiosity which drives us, not the money. I think that this is a pity that we may have lost that within schools.

We have learnt that there are no crazy technologies out there; even the Catholic Church is using a technology we have developed together with NASA they use it for their old books in the Vatican library. Research is everywhere, and they should start to look at what else they could do with this technology. What else you can use the algorithm or the sensor for because there is always a second or the third use. I think that we should do this because that would be fun. Curiosity is driving research and the same curiosity is also the driver of innovation.

Frank Salzgeber, Head of Innovation and Ventures Office, Directorate of Telecommunications and Integrated Applications, European Space Agency.

http://www.esa.int/

Disclaimer: This article is featured in the December issue of SciTech Europa Quarterly.

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How technology is allowing us to see further - SciTech Europa

A new VR title, Shuttle Commander, will let you recreate the Hubble Telescope Missions. Shuttle Commander is planned for all major VR platforms in 2019 but currently does not have a specific release date.

The experience will offer accurate recreations of the space missions, the shuttle cockpit and Hubble Space Telescope and allow you to play through various different aspects of the Hubble missions. Youll be able to play as a member of the Shuttle crew, take part in deployment, upgrade and servicing of the telescope and land the Shuttle back on Earth. There will even be scoreboards and achievements for shuttle landings.

Shuttle Commander is developed by Immersive VR Education the creators behind a series of educational VR projects including Apollo 11 and the new project also allows you to experience the discoveries of the Hubble Telescope and how it changed our understanding of the universe around us. According to the description on their YouTube video, Shuttle Commander will be available on all major VR platforms this year and trailer itself also features the Oculus, Vive, SteamVR logo and PlayStation logos.

Will you be launching off into space when Shuttle Commander lifts off later this year?Let us know in the comments below.

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Recreate The Hubble Space Telescope Missions In VR With Shuttle Commander - UploadVR

Updated On : 17 Nov 2019, 11:48:12 AM

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Right from taking images of aeging to dying stars, Hubble Space Telescope has given us a visual treat of the Outerspace. Hubble Space Telescope belongs to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA). News Nation brings to you the five breathtaking images of our universe captured by Hubble Telescope.

Image Credit: hubblesite.org

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Hubble Space Telescope captured two galaxies of equal size in a collision that appears to resemble a ghostly face. Hubble described the two galaxies of equal size as "The Red Spider Nebula might look like a cosmic arachnid, but it's actually the cast-off outer layers of a dying Sun-like star. The hot star's powerful stellar winds create waves in the expelled gas.

Image Credit: hubblesite.org

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Five Mesmerizing Images Captured By Hubble Space Telescope Of Our Universe - News Nation

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Although it looks a bit like an eerie, floating face suspended in space, the optical illusion spotted by theHubble Space Telescopeis really the result of two galaxies colliding.

Hubble took the image in June as part of its snapshot program, using gaps in its observation schedule to take photos of other intriguing targets.

The two glowing eyes of the face each represent the center of a galaxy.

Young blue stars help make up the outline of the face, while other groupings of new stars seem to sketch out a mouth and nose.

Galaxies arent the kindest of neighbors. They can crash into each other or one can cannibalize parts of another that comes too close.

But this system was formed by a relatively rare, head-on collision.

That means the ring we see that makes up the face is ephemeral, only lasting about 100 million years a short time on the universal time scale.

The ring formed when each galaxys disk, which is filled with gas, dust and stars, was pulled and stretched out by the collision.

This is the Arp-Madore 2026-424 system 704 million light-years from Earth, as noted in the Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations.

The Arp-Madore catalog is the result of work published by astronomers Halton Arp and Barry Madore, who both searched for unique galactic interactions.

Their combined work detailing thousands of galaxies was released in 1987.

Rings are rare because there are only a few hundred of them known in our corner of the universe. The circumstances that create them have to happen in a certain way for the ring to form.

And because the galactic centers of each one seen in the image appear to be the same size, that means the galaxies were equal in proportion before they collided. Usually, larger galaxies cannibalize smaller galaxies.

Hubbles growing collection of images, those of including unusually interacting galaxies, can provide astronomers with information about how galaxies evolve.

Hubblesobservationscan also help determine targets for future space telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope launching in 2021.

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Spooky face spotted in space by Hubble Telescope - FOX 31 Denver

By Faye Flam

ITS BECOME a kind of sport to shoot down social science claims, whether its the notion that you can ace interviews if you stand like Wonder Woman or charm your next date by reading two pages of Moby Dick before you leave.

And now critics have taken aim at a prize target a much-cited claim that symphony orchestras hire more women when they audition musicians behind a screen. There are big implications here, since the study has been used in diversity efforts across industries, which is why the take-down has taken off in the media.

But the blind auditions wont go the way of the other results that have vanished into air upon a more critical analysis. One reason is that blind auditions really exist; they were not a contrivance set up by scientists in a lab, as with the studies that have become infamous in the so-called replication crisis. Those mostly relied on experiments from which researchers made oversized and often counterintuitive claims. Some, it turned out, incorporated errors in statistical analysis that made random noise look like surprising new findings.

In contrast, blind auditions were independently adopted by real orchestras, starting with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in the latter part of the 20th century. The purpose was to prevent conductors from choosing their own students, or their personal favorites, and instead force them to focus entirely on the music. Its also been adopted for awarding astronomers time on the Hubble Space Telescope a limited resource that has only gone to a small fraction of astronomers who submit proposals.

In the 1990s, two economists Claudia Goldin, an Economics professor at Harvard, and Cecilia Rouse, now an economics professor at Princeton University set out to investigate whether blind selection in orchestras was the direct cause of a concurrent increase in the number of women hired for orchestra positions.

Goldin and Rouse went around the country to different orchestras to observe their auditioning practices and collect data on past practices as well as records of who auditioned and who got hired. Much of that data was buried in files in basements. They learned interesting things on the journey including the fact that some orchestras used carpeting or other measures to disguise the difference in sound between male and female footsteps.

The results, published in 2000, were complicated. There are different rounds of selection preliminary, semi-finals, and finals, and women did better in blind selections in some rounds but not others. This was reflected in the abstract of their paper, which admits up front that their data are noisy and some of their numbers dont pass standard tests of statistical significance.

In an interview, Goldin said that they were particularly interested in seeing what happened to the subset of people who applied to both blind and non-blind auditions. Asking people to audition behind a screen might bring in a different, more diverse group of applicants, she said, but there were some musicians who applied to both kinds. Comparing how they performed in blind versus non-blind auditions would offer a kind of natural experiment. And thats where those controversial numbers surface.

The paper says that, using the audition data, we find that the screen increases by 50% the probability that a woman will be advanced from certain preliminary rounds and increases by severalfold the likelihood that a woman will be selected in the final round. The results were cited by politicians and TED talk speakers, and often referenced by other researchers.

One of the critiques came from Columbia University statistics professor Andrew Gelman, whose blog posts have become known for identifying and explaining the kinds of statistical errors or cheats that have led to erroneous or misleading conclusions in social science and medical research.

He criticized the lack of clarity in the paper, writing that he could not figure out how they calculated the much-touted 50% figure, let alone the several-fold difference mentioned, so it was impossible for him to see whether these numbers stand up to statistical tests.

Thats a fair criticism. But even if their data were too noisy to determine that blind auditions increased female hires, that doesnt prove that theres no effect, or that discrimination didnt exist. Goldin said that their number comes from isolating just the cases where the same people applied in both kinds of auditions, and applies, as the paper says, only to certain stages in the process.

A similar study of the Hubble Telescope time got a comparable result. When identifying information was removed from proposals, women became more likely than men to get approved for the first time in the 18 years the data were tracked. As described in detail in Physics Today, the blinding also resulted in more time going to researchers from lesser-known institutions. Reviewers had to look at the substance of the proposals in more depth rather than relying on the track record of the proposers.

A third study looked at coders and found that in gender-blind submissions, womens code was more likely to be accepted than mens; but when the coders gender was known, womens code was accepted less often.

We shouldnt lump a study that examined decades of hiring data at real orchestras in with the headlines that oversold findings that forced smiles make you happier, that hearing words associated with aging make you walk more slowly, and that women are much more likely to vote for Republicans at certain points in the menstrual cycle.

Unlike those other disappearing findings which blustered about a whole new understanding of human nature or offered people too-easy-to-be-true life hacks this blind audition paper was modest, claiming only to shed light on a cultural phenomenon at a particular place and time. Theres no reason to throw it into the trash heap of bad science.

BLOOMBERG OPINION

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Can blind auditions help women succeed? Yes. - BusinessWorld Online

The LSST is getting close to completion. LSST Project/NSF/AURA

Theres a mystery at the heart of physics. Two decades ago, in 1998, cosmologists discovered that the universe is not just expandinga discovery of the early 20th centurybut that the rate at which its expanding is getting faster.

Thats not what they expected to find, but it made a kind of sense. If the expansion of the universe is accelerating, there needs to be a cause; not knowing exactly what that was, physicists called it dark energy. In theory, dark energy interacts through gravity, is spread out homogeneously through the universe, and is not particularly dense. If you total up all of the forces that make up the universe, it would account for 68.3 percent of matter and energy.

Account for dark energy, and certain theories of physics start to click. It helps explain the rate that galaxies rotate and reveals a more sensible age of the universewithout dark energy, scientists were finding that some stars were supposedly older than the universe as a whole. But almost 20 years after this discovery, physicists still know only a little bit about it. In order to learn more, scientists from dozens of institutions in 23 countries have been working together to create the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a giant, digital camera that has the power to capture the light of several billion faint galaxies, millions of light years away.

All the existing telescopes with cameras were built before the discovery of dark energy, said Paul OConnor, a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. We expect the LSST to map the entire sky and find out where all that dark matter has been hiding. OConnor has been working on the projects camera sensors for more than ten years, and at Atlas Obscuras Total Eclipse festival on Sunday, he explained how the telescope, when it goes into operation on a mountain in Chile, could transform our fundamental understanding of the universe.

For millennia, scientists and scholars have been looking at the night sky and recording their impressions with the best technology available. Starting in the 18th century, with the advent of photography, astronomers started taking pictures of the stars and other celestial phenomena; in 1851, a daguerreotypist, Johann Julius Berkowski, took the first photo of a solar eclipse. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble used what was then the worlds largest telescope to established that spiral nebulae were whole other galaxies, millions of light years distant from our own. The human understanding of space changed; we saw for the first time the extent of empty space, punctuated by these disc-shaped assemblies of stars, hundreds of billions of stars, which are the galaxies, as OConnor puts it.

In the 1970s, scientists at Bell Labs created a technology that used a charge-coupled device to capture lights as digital images. In 1981, the astrophotographer Jim Gunn used a CCD camera to create a 500 by 500 pixel image of a faint star cluster. He called that camera a nearly perfect device. This same technology, refined, is what kicked off the revolution in consumer-grade cameras and has given us the astounding images of the universe captured by the Hubble Telescope and other instruments. Today, there are dozens of huge telescopes, with top-notch CCD cameras. The question for the team building the LSST, OConnor says, is: Why are we going to the trouble of building another one? What will the LSST do that existing cameras will not?

If you looked up at the sky on a dark night, you might see 2,500 stars with your human eyes. The LSST would see a billion stars, OConnor said this weekend, and those stars would be outnumbered by distant galaxies, three to one. The cameras field of view is ten square degreesabout the size of a dime, held up to the sky. Every photograph we take of that size of the sky gets us another million galaxies, OConnor said.

One of the jobs of the LSST is to survey as many of these galaxies, over as wide a region of sky, as possible.

When the LSST goes into operation, which is scheduled for 2020, it will spend a decade scanning the sky, again and again. Over about 3,000 nights, the instrument will scan and capture each patch of sky one thousand times. Were really going to be making a movie of the universe, OConnor said. The LSST was specially designed to make this possibleit has a relatively wide field of view, it can scan each tiny section of the sky quickly, and it can look deep into the depths of the universe, to capture the faintest, most faraway galaxies.

With the information collected, cosmologists hope to start to better understand dark energy, the force that is causing those distant galaxies to speed away from us at an ever-increasing pace. This line of inquiry has the potential to transform the field of physics. The acceleration of the universe is, along with dark matter, the observed phenomenon that most directly demonstrates that our theories of fundamental particles and gravity are either incomplete or incorrect, the Dark Energy Task Force wrote in 2006. By looking at these faraway galaxies and understanding more about how they move, scientists may unlock fundamental truths about the nature of time, space, matter, and the forces that hold our world together, that have so far escaped our understanding.

Thats the reason theyre building the LSST. One of the reasons, at least.

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The Camera That Will Transform Our Understanding of the Universe - Atlas Obscura

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich calls the Magdalena Ridge Observatory a facility with enormous promise.

Heinrich toured the observatory Friday after announcing congressional funding for the observatorys interferometer project.

Were excited to be able to secure some federal funding to keep this moving down the road, Heinrich said. I think that the science of being able to track objects in space is only becoming more important over time, both from a scientific point of view and a defense point of view.

Heinrich said that was the reason $5 million in funding was secured from the Fiscal 2017 budget to help build the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer. Heinrich saw the first of the telescopes that will become the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI). When complete, the telescopes of MROI will be arrayed in a Y-shape and will be able to achieve a resolution 100 times greater than the Hubble Telescope.

Were working on the 2018 bill, Heinrich said. No promises, but were hopeful. A lot of people see the value of this project.

We deeply value the support we receive through Congress and the Air Force (who is working with New Mexico Tech on the project) for this really innovative research that we have here, New Mexico Tech President Stephen Wells added.

The funding will go toward the first telescope on the ridge, which is being moved into place, and the second telescope, which is under construction. The project is expected to cost $25 million when complete.

We dont have the money yet to complete the second telescope, New Mexico Tech Vice President for Research and Economic Development Van Romero said. When we receive that telescope will depend on when we receive the money and how its appropriated.

Romero said another $5 million is needed to get the second telescope on site. The appropriation from the Fiscal 2017 budget is the second round of funding. Another $15 million will be needed to complete the project.

We look forward to receiving the full amount of the appropriation so we can complete the project in a timely way and produce the science that weve promised Congress and our colleagues in the U.K., Wells added.

Cambridge University is working with New Mexico Tech on the project.

It really helps build on the scientific mission of New Mexico Tech broadly, Heinrich said. I have to say, I am amazed at the people I come in contact with who are familiar with the science that New Mexico Tech does, whether thats optics and telescopes, or explosives obviously or the engineering department. The reputation is quite deserved and very impressive.

Heinrich said he ran into people involved with the television show MythBusters last year and they couldnt stop raving about EMRTC and New Mexico Tech and the work they do there.

They were at the White House Science Night and they ended up talking about New Mexico Tech for quite a while, Heinrich said.

Heinrich said he had been to the ridge before, but this was the first time he actually toured the facility.

Its very impressive, Heinrich said. Im looking forward to the day when there are three operational telescopes. Thats when well be able to prove its value and concept nationally, and for that matter, internationally.

The telescopes will be able to track satellites and deep space objects, Romero said.

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Heinrich pays a visit to the MRO - El Defensor Chieftain