In this episode, some astronomers, a former astronaut, the current director of the Space Telescope Science Institute as well as the wife of Carl Sagan himself, got together and wrote a white paper that makes the case for a telescope, named after the famous astronomer Carl Sagan, that will look for and directly image planets like Earth around other stars
There are general-purpose telescopes and missions that astronomers can use to study specific objects. And there are the survey missions that look at the entire sky, which astronomers can use to answer questions about the Universe.
After James Webb Space Telescope, there’s LUVOIR, but what come after? Let’s have our imaginations take flight, out into the Universe, and consider some of the most incredible ideas suggested for telescopes.
Here is an excerpt from the “JWST: Too Big to Fail” stream. The history of JWST is long and storied and @DeepAstronomy will briefly outline some milestones.
We all know Hubble Space Telescope. But it’s not the only one. After Hubble came 3 more incredible telescopes. Each greater than the last! More about the great observatories with @AstronomyCast at #365DaysOfAstro
Some telescopes are carried high into the atmosphere on board balloons. What can they accomplish?
Think about it: Hubble is down to one gyro, maybe two; Kepler is in safe mode; and today, the Chandra X-ray telescope went into safe mode; Spitzer has run out of coolant but still doing science – our fleet of space telescopes is getting older what are we replacing them with?