The Most Important Telescopes In Astronomy!
519In the heart of all the science in astronomy, lies different types of telescopes helping astronomers observe different objects. So let’s find out what these types are and what makes them unique in the world of astronomical observations: The most important telescopes!
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One way to classify telescopes is by their location, on the ground VS in space. So we have ground-based telescopes, those that are stationed and operated from Earth like the Keck telescope, the Magellan Telescopes and the Lowell observatory.
Ground-based telescopes have to be built at high altitudes, preferably on mountaintops to provide the perfect environment for observation. Mountaintops provide a couple of benefits for observation:
1. They’re away from all the light pollution unlike cities where light pollution is at its maximum. 2. Mountaintops at high altitudes have less atmosphere, which means clearer sky for observation and less atmospheric distortion.
And then we have space-based telescopes, those that are stationed in space and operated from Earth like the Hubble space telescope and the Kepler space telescope, and those have the advantage of being above Earth’s atmosphere thus producing better images that are not distorted by the atmosphere.
On the other hand, ground-based telescopes produce blur images due to what is called “atmospheric distortion” and that
To adjust the quality of images and account for atmospheric distortion, ground-based telescopes have to have a set of equipment called “adaptive optics”
Now, you might ask, if space-based telescopes avoid the atmospheric distortion, and therefore produce better quality images, then why not use them all the time instead of ground-based ones? Will space-based telescopes make ground-based telescopes obsolete? Well, of course no!
And I have a couple of reasons to convince you why astronomers will always need ground based telescopes:
1. The cost, it took NASA and the European Space Agency ESA $ 1.5 billion to deploy the Hubble space telescope in orbit, and then an extra $ 50 million to fix a faulty mirror that was discovered only a couple of months after hubble was launched. so the cost of fabricating and operating telescopes is astronomically higher (pun intended) when they’re in space than when they’re on the ground.
2. Maintenance flexibility, if we have a faulty mirror or a problem in the electronic circuit of a ground based telescope, it’s somehow easy to solve, just ship the faulty equipment back to the fabrication factory to have it fixed. But in space, things aren’t quite as flexible!
If something goes wrong with a space-based telescope like the hubble space telescope for example, we have to send astronauts to fix the problem which is both risky for the astronauts and costly for the space agency.
Furthermore, other space-based telescopes don’t even have the luxury of being fixed once a problem arises, and that’s due to their higher orbit around the earth which makes it impossible for crewed missions to reach them.
3. Reliability, space-based telescopes are constantly in danger of being bombarded by space junk or tiny space debris, which puts more effort on engineers to design protective layers for the telescope and its mirrors, which again costs more money.
However, ground-based telescopes are more reliable and far away from any space hazards, protected under their dome from any dust particles or storms in Earth’s atmosphere.
4. Competence, astronomers around the world write proposals to obtain observation time on telescopes all around the world. And when it comes to proposal acceptance for time on space-based telescopes, the competition is sure higher. The hubble space telescope for example has an acceptance rate of 0.2! Yes you heard right! Only 2 proposals of each 10 submitted are approved!
Another way to classify telescopes is by looking at the optical range they detect, which basically means the kind of light the telescope is able to see. Not all telescopes can see all kinds of light, just like humans only see one kind of light that is the visible light, telescopes can also see one or 2 kinds of light.
The light spectrum is HUGE! It has so many ranges extending from gamma rays to visible light to radio waves and a punch of other ranges in between. Fortunately, astronomers have different telescopes “seeing” different ranges to help them do different kinds of science.
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