Extraterrestrial Ginge?

You may have all seen it before
but it's new to me and I thought it funny:

Hubble telescope discovers signs of life
and it doesn't seem friendly.

http://heritage.stsci.edu/2000/06/big.html

 

On 19 Jan 2004 03:33:58 -0800, (The Old Fogey)
bored us all completely to death with wittery prose along the lines
of:

Heh, but I suppose they've got the right to be pissed off, as Bush has
forced NASA to cut back on work associated with the telescope, no?

 

Well they have said that there will be no more missions to service the
telescope, because there isn't enough time to schedule one before the
shuttle is finally retired. Which means that as the gyroscopes fail and the
solar panels degrade, it will gradually become useless over the next four or
so years.

A bit of a shame, but IIRC, there is already a replacement one in
development (James Webb telescope?), slated to come online in 2011, which is
supposed to be 1,000 times more sensitive.

Of course, as spiralling development costs and deployment delays totally
**** up the replacement for the shuttle, they may be forced to drag it out
of retirement for a bit longer

 

This is another example of where spending $500billion would be much more
useful then attempting to send a bunch
of cowboys to mars.

 

Why? How "useful" is HST?
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Also from Hubble, OK, it's not funny but very impressive:
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2002/11/images/a/formats/1280_wallpaper.jpg

 

Here's a slide show here:

http://wires.news.com.au/special/mm/030811-hubble.htm

 

That is truly awesome. Any one here got access to a decent sized
telescope I could have a look through?

 

Not sure if this will help. The place I last contracted at (Telescope
Technologies, www.ngat.com) make robotically controlled 2.5M
astronomical telescopes. A couple of them (Faulkes [1]) have time
allocated for UK schools to use them over the internet. One of them is
based at the Haleakala crater on the Hawaiian island Maui and the other
will be based in the southern hemisphere. I imagine if you can find a
school with a decent astronomy club you might be in luck.

Not quite the same as looking through the telescope (during testing, to
do this involved lying on your back in a freezing cold factory and
looking through a bodged eye-piece).

Actually it would probably be easier to find a local astronomical
society and find out when they have an open night (which most do) when
they let people have a peer through there assorted telescopes.

[1] Dill Faulkes ( http://faulkes1.astro.cf.ac.uk/ ) is a cosmologist
with quite a bit of money, so he decided that he'd buy 2 2.5M
telescopes for educational purposes.

 

Okay fair enough.. I just have a bit of an issue with the whole $500 billion
thing.

 

Me too.

You could fund 4 decent sized Life Funds with that kind of cash.
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