(Ron Baalke) wrote in message ...

Super post Mr. Ron Baalke, Thanks

WORLD'S SINGLE LARGEST TELESCOPE MIRROR MOVES TO THE LBT
....
Work on the LBT began with construction of the telescope building in 1996
and is scheduled to be completed in 2005 when both mirrors are installed at
the $100 million facility. The two mirrors together are valued at $22
million. The telescope building is a 16-story structure, the top ten floors
of which rotate.
The LBT will have twin 8.4-meter mirrors on a single telescope mount, giving
it the light-collecting area of an 11.8-meter (39-foot-diameter) telescope.
But what really excites astronomers is that the LBT will make images of even
faint objects as sharp as a 22.8-meter (75-foot) telescope would. This is
nearly ten times sharper than the images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
When the LBT is fully operational, it will be the world's most powerful
optical telescope, capable of imaging planets beyond our solar system. It
will allow astronomers to peer deeper into the universe than ever before.
....
Comments Welcome

I think it will be 50 - 100 years before space-craft
could be developed that can indefinitely sustain
intergenerational life - that may be called starships -
and enable man to travel to a few other stars.
In the meantime, the only other alternative I can
see is to build larger telescopes to *travel to the
stars* virtually.

I was impressed to read the LBT could be done
for $100M. By comparison a Shuttle launch is
near $1Giga and the projected Next Generation
Space Telescope would cost at least $2Gigabucks,
to place.

Some new ground based technologies are very
impressive. We visited MacDonald Observatory in
Texas and saw a huge multi-faceted mirror, I've
read about laser scintillation correction technology,
and the principles of image recombination that
permits two separate mirrors to act as one.

What could we get for $1-10 Gigabucks on the
ground, IOW's how big would the scope be
and how close would the stars become, what sort
of maximum magnification is possible?

Would we be able to resolve earth like planets
around stars within a radius of 100 light years?
And then perform spectroscopy on their atmo-
spheres for biological knowledge?

If the atmosphere poses an upper limit on
performance then we should calculate the
required size to perform a biological survey
of planets within 100 Ly's or so and presume
this will be a space-based scope in a vacuum.

How would one estimate the resolution and
magnification of a 1000 foot mirror?

Hubble was sold on the idea of seeing to the
edges of the universe, ok we've been there,
done that.

I really think people will be prepared to pay
$40 each (x 250,000,000 taypayers)
= $10 billion to be able to determine biological
entities in distant planets atmospheres.

With this information we would have a better
idea on how to direct the SETI program.

Thanks in advance,
Regards Ken S. Tucker