Looking Through Telescopes: Part 2

finish talking about them, that's right. So without you, Lauren, we recorded the first part of a podcast episode about telescopes, and today we're going to tackle part two. So what are we talking about? Last time we we sort of started with some musings about the history of telescopes and what they mean to us, the fact that they're not just for creating images that are pleasing to the eye, but they're actually very important scientific instruments. They give us knowledge.

It's very useful for determining our place in the universe and learning things that we couldn't otherwise know. Yeah, like being able to confirm the fact that the Earth is not the center of the universe, right, that was one of the thing. Yeah, pretty good. Well, I mean there were a lot of different lines of evidence that eventually converged to disprove the geocentric models, the idea that everything

revolves around the Earth. But but being able to see stuff in outer space certainly helped, right, So when Galileo looked through his telescope and saw moons orbiting Jupiter and saw the phases of Venus and things like that, that was some good evidence. Okay, really it seems like we're we're all going around the Sun instead of it all

going around us, and that trend is continued. So we saw how the Hubble telescope helped us, uh narrowed down the age of the universe, and how other telescopes have have taught us all kinds of things about the our whole model of cosmology, the history of the universe, where we all come from. And now we want to take where we've gone and project forward. Right, So we're looking

into the future of telescopes. We're gonna be talking about some telescopes that are in various stages of being constructed. Some of them are just in the concept stage, haven't been built. At all. Uh, some of them are space bound telescopes. Some of them are here on Earth or will be here on Earth. Yeah, and I think, and hopefully all will agree with me, I think it is best to start with the good old James Webb space telescope because I think this is one of the coolest

things going on in science today. I'm pretty excited about it. Yeah. This is a sort of the successor to the Hubble, right, it's the next generation space observatory, and it's really meant

to to gaze further than the Hubble ever could. And we all hope that the the mirrors aboard the James Webb will be properly installed and properly formed, because we talked in the last episode about how the Hubble famously had an aberration on its primary mirror, a multibillion dollar opperation, so we had to send up service missions to repair the Hubble telescope to get it working in proper order.

But that might not be so much an option with the James web space Telescope, because well, a couple of reasons Shuttle program being being shelves is a big one. That's one of them. The other one being that James web space telescope is not going to be easily accessible because it's not going to be in low Earth orbit. Now, this is a large infrared telescope with a six point

five meter primary mirror. Uh, and you know it's it's supposed to look at everything from the beginning of the universe up to present day, like to really look at not just how how conditions were moments after the Big Bang, but how the universe evolved over time, how did galaxies form, how did how did stars form? Right, Because you have to remember, when you use a telescope that can see as far as these space telescopes can, you're essentially using

some kind of visual time machine. Yeah, you're looking back in time. That's exactly right, because light only travels at a certain speed. Yeah, the speed of light, as it turns out, exactly, So when you peer across the galaxy, you're not seeing things happening in real time. You're seeing the light that left those things as far away as they are, and it's taken all this time for that exactly to cross the distance in between to reach you. Right.

So the further and further you peer out into the universe, the further and further back you're seeing in time. Yeah. For example, I mean, if you were to look at the Sun, don't don't look at the sun, never look directly into the Sun. But if you were, you know how how far back that goes? Right? About ten minutes and eight minutes. Yeah, it takes about eight minutes for light from the Sun to reach the Earth, So you

are actually looking back in time by eight minutes. You're not looking at where the Sun is now or how the Sun appears now. You're looking at how the Sun appeared eight minutes ago. So same sort of of idea, except you just extend it and the further out you go, the further back in time you're looking. Yeah. So the Hubble has been able to show us some really amazing ancient stuff like early galaxies in the ultra deep field.

This stuff is really exciting. The James Web Space Telescope is going to let us see even further back right, and it's it's the design is really neat. The primary mirror actually is segmented and can fold up hexagonal segments.

So the cool thing about it is that it can be folded for launch, because obviously this is a very delicate instrument and launch I don't know if you guys know this, but if you were to strap a lot of rocket fuel to your bottom and then push yourself up into space by lightning set rocket fuel, it's a bit of a bumpy ride. It's pretty hardcore. It's the most metal of all launches. It is. It makes even

astronauts puke. Yes, astronauts are the best people at not puking. Like, of all the people in a not puking contest, they would be at the top. So in the puking spectrum, they are trained. They are close to to zero p right there, the least puky, but sometimes even they puke, whereas babies would be way on the other end of that spec Yeah, they'd be high puking coefficient, possibly only exceeded by the young girl in the Exorcist. But anyway, that's not her fault. She's possessed. I didn't well, I

didn't say it was her fault. I was merely saying, but it is a very bumpy ride. And telescopes, of course, the mirrors, the huge mirrors that we used to create gigantic reflecting telescopes optical and infrared like the James Webb

is going to be are very delicate. Yes, And the James Webb telescope will have four instruments aboard it, the near infrared camera or near CAM, the near infrared spectrograph or near SPEC, the mid infra red instrument mirror, and then finally the fine guidance sensor slash near Infrared imager and slit less spectrograph or figures nearest. Yeah, that one is that one does not go into acronym form very and he was one of my favorite Roman emperors. Didn't

he didn't he play fiddle while Rome just swallow. Well, so so what what ranges of of light? Is this thing going to be detecting? From point six to twenty eight micrometers in wavelengths? So point six by the way, some numbers. So so a micrometer is is essentially one thousand nanometers, right, So if you look at the spectrum of light and you look at the different wavelengths and you look at six d nanometers, that would be point

six micrometers. That's how far down uh, the and the visible spectrum the this will be able to look and that that's somewhere in the orange slash red area. So you know, you think of your roy G BIV. Your longer wavelengths are on the roy side, so it's not gonna be able to see anything from yellow on, but red and orange it will be able to look at as well as infrared. And keep in mind we mentioned this in our previous episode when we talked about infrared telescopes.

The data that we get from these often we end up putting it through some sort of visualization software so that we add color that we can actually perceive right right, which is easier for us to look at. Yeah, we you see these amazing gorgeous pictures of space, like the

amazing nebula right right. Anything from a nebula or a supernova that you've ever seen has been a basically an artist's rendition of of figuring out what those wavelengths would be, sort of sort of scaling it, you know, like if if you've ever done music and you know how to how to scale octaves down or up the right right. Similarly, though, I do want to clarify based on artists rendition, that doesn't just mean like a guess. It's a very scientific

ascessive guessing. Yeah, but it's essentially you take you take the data you have and you extrapolate from it in order to get us an image that we can perceive if you can see, And I'm just saying that the really pretty colors are specifically chosen, yes, for reasons, I mean, in addition to being mathematically sound, because they are really pretty. It's both at the same time. It's true. Yes, So we mentioned it's going to be looking at some of

the earliest things in the universe. What does this really mean? So we're saying it's peering beyond where the Hubble scene, beyond the altar deep field, way way back in time into I guess, beyond the first billion years of the universe's existence, right way into the past. What's it going to see? So you kind of need to know a little bit about the Big Bang theory for this to make sense. But in for a good long while compared to what the time scale that we humans are used to.

I mean, it's a blink of an eye in the galactic time scale, but a good long while. Uh. In g and matter, we're all kind of one thing. It was the universe was extremely dense, so dense that light could not pass through it. Uh. Then it eventually expanded out. And once it expanded out, and you started getting some cooling and you had energy and mass separating out. You started to have the formation of stars and galaxies, and it's that first generation of stars that we're looking for

with James Webb. Yeah, we're really looking at more about the formation of the earliest galaxies. But yes, you know that those would be of course, yeah, yeah, the earliest star probably, So yeah, it's um, maybe we'll find out, but yeah, it's it's the it's it's a really exciting idea, the idea of being able to get a closer look at these conditions because a lot of this just exists right now in the realm of hypothesis or theory, where we have done the calculations and we know what we

expect to find, but this will be the actual finding. Yeah. So that's always exciting because that whole testing hypotheses through observation exactly, and it may turn out that we see things we didn't expect, which means we have to adjust what we believe, which is really exciting. Yeah. So that's what scientists absolutely love, um or at least I think the theoretical ones do, right right, Um, Okay, So so these mirrors that we're talking about, I mean Is it

the same stuff that's in my bathroom mirror? What's what's up with these guys? No? No, no, no. So the James Web Telescope we mentioned it has interlocking hexagonal mirrors, and that's so it can sort of fold out of its cocoon like a butterfly when it reaches the place in space where it needs to be. But the mirrors are made out of BILLI um, okay like that stuff? I mean you don't. You don't want to go breathing a lot of berrillium dust? What that's about? All I

knew about burrillium? Yeah, I I know nothing about billium. I have no practice. Keep going to say berrillium sphere, but I'm almost certain that was in a Star Trek episode actually, from what's that movie with with the Tim Allen and oh Galaxy Quest? It always reminds me of Sailor Moon. So, okay, let's let's science. So why beryllium for the mirrors? Well, there are a lot of properties about brillium that make it a really good idea to use it in these mirrors. Number one is very light

and it's strong for its weight. But the telescope's mirror also has to hold its shape at the cryogenic temperatures in deep space, So this is going to be like a negative four hundred degrees fahrenheit or negative trees. See, at these extreme temperatures, most materials are going to contract or change their volume, which is bad news if you're talking about something that is going to allow you to

get a look at a distant universe. If the shape changes, then clearly that that was like one of the issues with the hubble. It was that it wasn't that the mirrors shape changed, but because of that aberration, we didn't get those clear pictures we were expecting. Yeah. Yeah, and if you're if you don't remember from from last episode, the fraction by which it was off was like some some sliver of a human hair's width, and yet it

was sometimes beyond the accepted UH range of error. So we're talking about an incredibly thin margin of error here. Creating these telescopes require some really precision engineering. Yeah. So so if the stuff to forms, that would be bad, but brillianm wouldn't do that. Well. It will deform, because pretty much all materials will, but brillium holds up pretty well comparatively. It will still deform. So the project engineers.

They were designing these mirrors, they had to test cool them to the temperatures that they'll experience in deep space. So they test them, they cool them down to those temperatures, record the magnitude of the changes, and then pre correct for those temperature based changes. Were polishing the mirrors in the final stages of design, I imagine they must have used liquid nitrogen will only get you down so cool. They must have had to use liquid helium to do that.

I really don't know what they mean. I think they had to send them off to a separate facility for the cooling. I imagine, so your average freezer does not get down to min uh so. Anyway, what I'm trying to convey is that getting something like this to work is a marvel of modern science. It is a lot of work. Even the smartest people among us are having to do really hard work to make this work right, and I think they deserve mega respect for what they're doing. Absolutely.

And there are also one of the other things that James Webb telescope is gonna be looking for We're gonna be talking a lot about in this episode, which is it's gonna look for the physical and chemical properties of exoplanets, and the hope there is that we might be able to discover exo plants that are either already a habitat for life or could be a potent ential habitats. Yeah.

So it's not the only space telescope out there that's going to be doing this, or even I mean, there's some some terrestrial ones that are going to be looking for uh planets that could potentially support life as well. One of the other ones is the Advanced Technology Large Aperture Space Telescope. Yeah, I've heard of this. So basically this is a proposal that is for the further future

that goes even beyond the James Web right. It's and it's an optical telescope, So we're still talking about looking for light, whether it's visible spectrum yeah, yeah, well, or it could be infrared. I mean, you know, optical does not necessarily mean that it's not infrared, but it does. Uh. It isn't looking for radio signatures or X rays or

anything like that. Um. And it's still in the design phase, and it's supposed to look for the presence of life, among other things, on distant planets and and to remove all ambiguity about it. You know, we often hear about exoplants being discovered and then through analysis we try to kind of determine what sort of chemicals might or might

not be present on that planet. This is supposed to be a telescope that will be powerful enough for us to get those answers without us saying, well, it probably may be because you know, a lot of those upon further study end up not panning out, or uh, it turns out that we didn't have a good enough picture of what we were looking at. In some cases, we have exoplanets that you know, quote unquote exoplanets that we have identified that have since disappeared, which may mean that

the original detection was an aberration itself. So this is really meant to complex conclusions based on very limited data exactly, and it it really does hammer home the fact that we have to be careful about these kind of conclusions and and for those of us in this room, we have to be careful when we're reporting upon it to make sure that we add that critical thinking layer and say this is what it appears to be, but keep in mind that until we have further observations, we cannot

be sure. So uh, that's just me trying to remind myself to to practice good skills. Huh yeah. So the acronym here is at last, which just makes me think of Fitzgerald songs. But in fact that's all it's gonna be playing deep in space. So if you were, if you were able to put your ear right up against it, less sing the whole song. I'm not going to sing the whole song. You already made fun to the end. You made it fun of me for singing uh, oh

Susannah earlier. So listeners, you need to know this. Jonathan Strickland knows the other stanzas to Oh Susanna. He knows the ones beyond the first. Not only is he a terrific podcast, what you're what you're telling them is that I know the verses, not just the chorus. Yeah, that might be right anyway, that that's beside the point. Let's talk about telescope Okay, well alright, so so what the

deal last, Well, it's another ACID project. It's through the Space Telescope Science Institute, which also does it did run the Hubble program, and it's running the James Web Space Telescope program as well. Um, and like you guys said, it's still in the design stage. The hope is that it would be launching somewhere around like so it's still

pretty far out from the current day. Uh. And they're entertaining three different mirror types right now, aiming for less complexity and or mass than the Hubble and James Webb, but with better angular resolution and sensitivity like as much as like like two thousand times the sensitivity of the Hubble, so it would be able to detect much fainter bodies than would that that will become important to We'll be talking about some telescopes that are going to be looking

at looking for stuff that a lot of other telescopes will miss, but we really really need to know about them, right right, Yeah, you had a note in here about how it's going to be looking for for biosignatures of life, Like, yeah,

it's like things like molecular oxygen, water and methane. This is the sort of stuff that you know, again, we've we've looked at like spectral analysis of exoplanets and said, oh, this might be methane on this planet, which would be a biosignature that would be an indication that there's some form of organic life. They're not necessarily the only source

of it. I feel like I've heard that about oxygen. Yeah, I mean, because at least we know about Earth that Earth didn't have an oxygen atmosphere until it was created by I believe it was cyano back here. Yeah. And then if you remember, you know, we've we've had some close calls with detecting methane on on nearby bodies. Uh not that long ago. That pan did not pan out for us. You remember hearing about Mars and the supposed detection of methane. Did we bring it with us? Yes,

we brought it with us. That was the problem. So now in the case with telescopes, we don't have to worry about that because we're just looking. We're not actually sending a probe there what that could potentially end up contaminating contaminating the sample exactly. Yeah. Um One interesting thing that I was reading about when I read about this, that I hadn't particularly thought about before, and it goes back to what we were saying earlier about launching um SO.

One of the things that the designers have to think about is how to get these giant suckers into space. Um SO, two of their mere concepts here hypothetically compatible with another thing that doesn't exist yet, which is NASA's proposed Space Launch System or SLS, and um the third, which I think is not really their favored design, would be able to go up on one of the U. S Air Force Department of Defense evolved expandable launch vehicles like the Delta four and the Atlas five, which are

currently in use. So and we may also see something like SpaceX step up and design either a vehicle specifically for these or modifying one of their existing designs to allow for this kind of thing, because we're already seeing that sort of uh collaboration in getting astronauts to space. That was a pretty recent discussion where NASA said that a SpaceX capsule would soon be taking astronauts up to the International Space Station, which is pretty exciting stuff. So

we may see that as well. It's always kind of terrifying to me whenever I read about one of these really cool projects that is proposed and not yet developed that is going to depend upon another really cool project that's proposed but not yet developed, because if one or the other falls through, then you don't have your project certainly. Yeah, I mean, just you know, it just added another interesting layer of it to me, which I guess is of course,

if you really think about it, it's obvious. But you know, sitting there and saying like, well, so what we're gonna do with this extremely expensive, like billion dollar, highly precise mirror. We're going to strap a lot of rocket fuel to it, um, and then we're going to light a fire in the rockets. Sounding a lot like a MythBusters episode right now, like we've built this amazing thing, how do we blow it up? Uh? Now?

The next one I wanted to talk about, I imagine the saying just kidding, we're going to hand it over to the Russians. Also is the Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite or TESTS, which I just like that acronym so. TESTS is scheduled to launch in the near future and will perform a survey of the sky in search of habitable

planets in the Goldilocks zone. So that's in that that zone of orbits that we believe would be conducive to supporting life based upon what we know from our sample size of one planet that has life on it that we know of UM, and then also just looking for exo plants in general. So it will cover four times more area than the Kepler thirty seven B telescope, which also is known for looking for exoplanets. Okay, so this is sort of an exoplanet hunter that is designed to

cast a wide net. Yes, you have to really, because you know, we have we have ideas of how many exoplanets must be out there based upon the information we've discovered from the ones we've seen, right a lot, Yeah, like tons of them, and this would help us either verify that or refute that. Both of those would be important. So yeah, exciting either way. Ye. And then we have the European extremely Large Telescope. I added that because I

love that name, that the europe larger. European extremely Large Telescope sounds like something out of Douglas Atoms. It makes the European Large. The European Large Telescope has got terrible envy of the extremely Large Telescope. Well, even the very inadequate European very Large Telescope has got to feel a little threatened. It's kind of feelt a little bummed. Well right now, it's still doing pretty well because this is

the one that hasn't been built yet. No, this isn't no. After this comes to the European hilariously large, the ludicrously large telescope, when when you notice that the Earth's orbit has been slightly altered due to the presence of the telescope there, Well, this is actually an Earth based telescope, right yea, which while they suffer some disadvantages compared to space telescopes obviously they have to deal with the atmosphere and things like that, but they also have advantages in

that they're right here and we can work on them, and they're easier to build and get in place. Right. We don't have to worry about space junk, yeah, encountering one. We don't. And if something does go wrong, like you say, we could have maintenance and repair there immediately, as opposed to well, now we have to plan a mission, we have to train people, we have to get them up into space, and then we have figure out how to

get them back down safely. I mean that's anytime you're talking about any kind of space mission that's a maintenance issue. It's a huge endeavor and of course it costs millions and millions of dollars. Not so much if you're doing a maintenance uh here on Earth. I mean pretty expensive comparatively, Yeah, exactly in the grand scheme of things, tell me about this one. So it's it's optical and near infra red, so we're talking visible light to near infrared. And it

will have a thirty nine meter main mirror. That's so the largest telescope in the world right now. We talked about it in the last episode is the Grand Telescopio U Karias in Spain on the Canary Islands, and it has a ten point four meter mirror, So this one will be a thirty nine meter mirrors almost four times. Yeah, it's enormous. So it'll be searching for earthlike planets and the habitable zones, just like we were talking about with tests, except it will be doing it here on Earth, and

it'll also be looking for uh other. It will also be doing other projects in astronomy and cosmology, including a search into the universe's past. So very similar to what we had talked about with the James Webb and it's going to be at the Let's see if I can get this Carol amazonis the mountain in Chile? Is that Caro or Sarah? I would think it was Sarah. It could be it could be uh, you know that my, my,

my Latin languages are terrible. I'm more of a Germanic kind of guy, so it will be a lot of hilarity with me trying to Hey, I'm just saying that that's my my, your aistic background, yea thought connect. So another another enormous telescope plan for Chile is the giant Magellan Telescope, which is going to have a twenty four

point five meter primary mirror. Uh and although that mirror is actually gonna be made up of seven eight point four meter diameter segments, so it's another segment and mirror that collectively acts as one primary mirror. And while we're in Chili, how about we visit the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. That's a yeah, because it's gonna be awesome. It's got

a three point two giga pixel camera. Forget your merry canna understand what that means, but okay, yeah, well I mean I do, but that's just very that's beyond my personal conception of Yes, Okay, this camera is going to scan the entire sky twice a week in panoramic shots, so you're gonna get the entire view of the night sky from this perspective in Chile twice a week, and um, it's gonna help us make a really detailed sky map which could potentially lead to billions of discoveries of new bodies,

from stars to asteroids. And according to to one researcher who works on the project, it will be the first time that astronomers have cataloged more objects than there are living people on Earth. So very exciting. Also, you know, being able to detect those asteroids very important, just as I was kind of alluding to that earlier in the podcast. But one of the things that a lot of people have brought to our attention is that, you know, asteroids

have a potential of colliding with Earth. We've heard about this kind of thing several times in the last few years, and uh, we don't have a whole lot of contingency plans for what to do in order to avoid such a thing, because if it's a large enough asteroid, that can be an extinction level event. Right even if it doesn't directly cause enough damage to wipe out all life,

it may indirectly cause it. So being able to detect these asteroids earlier gives us the opportunity to come up with a plan to move the asteroid out of the way, which is the most likely, uh choice that we would have the solution to that problem. Less likely would be sending up Bruce Willis to blow it up with like a nuclear bomb, because that probably wouldn't do us any good. I mean, we could try. Well, you know, I would hate to lose Bruce Willis. Yeah. Well, I don't know.

Have you seen the Last to die Hard movies? I mean, I'm just saying so, although those I can't really blame Bruce Willis. Speaking of Bruce Willis, let's talk about biceps. Yeah.

We we talked about BICEP two in her last episode, and Lauren and I talked about bicep to quite a bit when we did our update super brief refresher what is bicep to what it looks for the cosmic microwave background radiation and specifically looking for polarization to give an indication for the presence of gravitational waves, which would in turn be a support for the inflation model of the

Big Bang theory. Lauren and I talked about how some of the findings that came out of a an announcement that we heard back in March from the BICEP team I have since been not disproven, but certainly called into question due to the amount of space dust which might have been mucking up the senseries. Right, So BICEP two did all of its work from two thousand ten to two thousand twelve, I think, and UH, BICEP three would

be the the next phase. It would be the next cosmic microwave background radiation observatory, really the South Pole South Pole YEA and UH. It will have two thousand, five hundred sixty detectors operating at a one hundred giga hurts frequency um and it'll again be studying the same thing

that the BICEP to array studied. And the hope is that even if the the information from BICEP too hands out to be less spectacular than what we first believed, this will be able to look for the trace evidence of gravitational waves that might have been you know, somewhat boosted space dust. But we'll be able to get more to the truth of the matter, is the hope. Okay, I got another one. Okay, how to blow your mind with why don't we put telescopes on the moon but

to look back at the Earth. Tom, I didn't even think about that that that that might happen. Who knows that could that could happen. No, So we've talked, we talked in the last podcast. In a little bit in this one, I think about some of the problems with having observatories here on Earth. You've got to deal with moisture in the atmosphere and that gets in the way, dust,

light pollution, all kinds of things like that. If you're talking about an optical telescope, atmospheric you have to see through. So you have to place your observatories very carefully. You want to put them like at a high altitude in a very dry place. Sure. Sure, And even if you're talking about like like infrared telescopes are kind of poor on Earth because the heat of the Earth is going to mess steff up, right, they have to be very sensitive. And the same thing is true if you're talking about

radio telescopes. I mean, we have radio telescopes here on Earth, but they get interference things on all of the radio waves. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of I mean we're using different frequencies, sure, but right there's just I think I mentioned in the last podcast that I had. I had read something a while ago while I was researching a

blog post. I think it was for last year that if you were to stand on the surface of the Moon and activate a cellular telephone, that would create a signal that radio astronomers on Earth would consider pretty strong. You would also have terrible reception and you would very quickly die. Well, I think you made the same joke the last time. I made the die joke last time, because you were talking about you wouldn't necessarily die like a Look, you're smart. They've all heard it before, Jonathan.

This is just for us anyway. So these things have to be very sensitive, and what are you going to do? How do you how do you shield them from all of the radio frequency activity on the Earth. So well, one idea is put a giant hunk of rock between the Earth's generating all these radio signals and these radio telescopes. So you're thinking of actually having all the telescopes on the far side of the Moon, which is not, by the way, the dark side of the Moon, at least

not all the time. No, no light still hits it, just not when we can see it, right, because we don't see it. The moon is tidally locked with Earth. So that means the same face of the Moon faces the Earth all the time, but all surfaces of the Moon, at some point or another get light from the Sun. Right.

Confusing the fact that there is a permanent far side of the Moon with the with the misconception that there's a permanent dark side of the Moon is kind of like how a baby thinks if you cover its eyes it has disappeared. That's not true. You've blow in my mind here, Joe. Uh No, under that light can fall on things even if we don't see them. So the moon goes all the way around, it gets sun on both sides, yes, but but it does not. It does have a side that is permanently facing away from the Earth.

And in fact, the first time we saw that was when the Apollo mission uh circled behind was in lunar orbit, and they took pictures of the surface which were really kind of creepy looking. That a lot of frazers. But now the talk is about putting telescopes on that side.

Like you were saying, Joe, it's completely isolated from all the interference that would be generated on Earth, and you don't have to worry about the atmospheric distortion, so you could have different types of telescopes, and in fact, we've heard proposals for things like radio telescopes and optical telescopes on the surface of the Moon on the far side, which would be pretty cool. It's also a huge challenge.

I mean, it's not easy for us to Obviously, we haven't gone back to the Moon with a manned mission since the seventies, so, uh, you know, it's it's not easy for us to do this necessarily. But I think most of the um proposals I saw suggested using rovers and to to deploy. Yeah, so you'd be using robe lots, not actual people to set these things up. But yeah, it's it's kind of cool that there are some issues.

One of them is that if you're using a radio telescope, you have to power the telescope, right and and so how do you generate power on the except then the sun is actually emitting radio waves, so the only time you would be able to use the telescope is when

you're getting the most interference. So what you would need if you had if you had some kind of battery packs or something, then you could you could charge when it's not in use and use the telescope when it's that's a possibility that The other one that I remember reading was proposed, I think it was earlier this year, was the idea that you could make this base near the south pole of the Moon and so mounting solar rays on the peaks of the south pole of the Moon.

They would constantly receive sunlight in all directions, and then having something down in a crater perhaps where it wouldn't be yeah, just so slightly off to the other side where or shielded from the sun is where you would have your telescope array. I've also heard of using nuclear pellets to power these essentially the same way that a lot of our Yeah, I think we should get a lot of nuclear power on the Moon, I mean just in general, I mean, even if we're not really using it.

I think that the more nuclear way stations we can have, if there's nothing, if nothing else, it's going to provide the fodder for numerous James Bond films right road, which is really what we're all aiming for. The forward thinking. Okay, speaking of kind of James Bond sounding concepts, this next one, uh, sounds so much like science fiction to me, and it's a real thing that's happening, and I adore it so much. So there's a concept for a lunar liquid mirror telescope UM.

And we don't have one of these on the Moon yet, but some do exist on Earth. And the idea is to use a reflective liquid like mercury in a rotating dish instead of a traditional you know, solid illuminized glass mirror.

And so the rotation of the dish, if it's if it's done, you know, very precisely, will place gravitational and inertial forces on the liquid that that let's form this this uniform, perfect parabolic shape for reflection that's also self correcting, so you wouldn't get any of that hubblesque trouble with imperfect mirrors that cost billions to replace. Um. And like I said, there are a few on Earth. UM. The biggest is the large Zenith the telescope, which is in

British Columbia in Canada. Um it's almost twenty feet across. Uh so yeah, yeah, not not too not too shabby. And UM, putting one of these suckers on the Moon would be pretty red because you know, the Moon, as we have said, right, doesn't have that pesky Earth atmosphere UM. But it also would create a bunch of problems. For example, the temperature would make mercury freeze uh, thereby not making it a very useful liquid telescope UM uh. And that also need to design a new dish support system that

would that would let it rotate smoothly. The large Zenith, for example, uses an air cushion, which would not work without you know air UM, so that's problematic. The lunar atmosphere is sparse. To be fair, they're they're talking, they're talking about using um like a superconductor, uh, electromagnetic. So the quantum lock totally, totally. And the really cool thing other than the fact that it's a mirror made of liquid, is that they're a lot cheaper than solid mirror telescopes UM.

You know, they can't be rotated the way that we do mirror you know, traditional mirrors, because the liquid would spill out UM, which would also make it less useful UM. But in the end it really simplifies construction. UM. And a moon base would be really great for infrared telescopy because the base temperature is so low, you know, we we wouldn't run into the same kind of trouble that

we do on Earth. Um, you know, there hasn't been a whole lot of buzz about this kind of thing since around two eight, but at the time people were projecting possible launches out into the twenties or so. So I think that we should all keep our ears out

and see if anyone's been working on it. That's really cool. Yeah, you know, I wonder if the idea of having telescopes on the Moon is one of those that might not be self justifying, But if we ever were to create a colony at one of the poles of the Moon, it would be sort of a logical extension of that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and there's a lot of focus to to use the Moon as sort of the proving grounds for deeper, yeah, deeper explorations into space, particularly a manned mission to Mars.

I mean, NASA's current proposed approach involves asteroids in the Moon as sort of a stepping stone to get to Mars, so it totally makes sense. And they're also talking about using the polar regions of the Moon for this one, because that's I think, basically just the best place to put this kind of stuff. But now, guys, I want to take a look at the future and ask a question about the limits of telescope technology. So you're gonna look through a telescope at the future of telescopes to

see the limit of telescope. So when you look through a telescope, you're looking at the past. That's true. The further back you look, the further back you look backwards through a telescope at the future. Okay, So I want to know what constrains the upper limit of telescope resolution because we can see a certain distance out. I mean, telescopes obviously have better resolution than they used to. But what if we want to see the kinds of things that are just absolutely beyond the limits of what we

can see today. What if we want to be able to directly image the surface of planets in solar systems halfway across the galaxy? What prevents us from doing that? Do we just need really big lenses? Yeah, that's the question. Basically,

I wanted to know. Is it a har word limit imposed by physics, Is it just something that you just can't do that, or is it something about the nature of telescopes a technological problem that we could actually achieve if we just build better and better telescopes, larger sizes, more precision engineering of the mirrors. And I actually passed this request along to some of our contacts at NASA

and got a really exciting answer. That's awesome. So yeah, the answer came back from Dr John Mather, the two thousand six Nobel Laureate in physics and the senior project scientist on the James Web Space Telescope, and he he sent me back this answer. It's said as follows. Telescopes are limited by the wave nature of light, so that a point like object appears to have an angular size of at least lambda divided by d, where lambda is the wavelength, meaning the wavelength of the light, and d

is the diameter of the telescope. So that means if you want a sharper image and you can't change the wavelength of the light you're studying, you absolutely have to have a bigger telescope, even if you're building it in outer space. So I think what he's saying there is that we we can resolve greater images farther and farther

out there, but there is a size restriction. I mean, the problem is you've got to build bigger and bigger mirror arrays, and we've already talked earlier in the podcast about how hard that is to do and to get them into space, especially Dr Matther says, but here on the ground we have another problem. The atmosphere we love to breathe is always changing and making the images we see in the telescope dance around with tremendous effort. We

can build equipment to compensate for that. It's called adaptive optics, and it can work quite well, but we still need a bigger telescope if we want to get a sharper image. Interesting. So, really the limit is size, well, size and whatever light you're using to study, so exactly right. So there is a physics limit, but it's not a physics limit on

the resolution that we can see. Ultimately, it's a physics limit that constrains what we can see based on the size of the telescope, based on what we can build or have built so far. Rather interesting. So, uh, that that's really cool. I'm glad that you were able to get that that answer. That's awesome. Yeah, so big thanks to Dr Mather and also thanks to Maggie Zetti at NASA. For putting us in touch with him. That was a really interesting thing to learn. Yeah, yeah, I feel like

we could probably say this every episode, but thanks NASA. Yep, I agree, we can say that, and now we will one, two, three, Thanks NASA. Well, and thank you guys, you listeners out there who are listening to our show. I hope that you really enjoyed this episode. Remember, you can get in touch with us and let us know what topics you would like us to cover in the future about the future. Let us know on Twitter or Google Plus or Facebook. We have the handle fw thinking over at Twitter and

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