Re: Autonomous Space Telepscopes...

Wasn't it Johnny1a who wrote:

So suppose you were programming the computers on this thing to work
while you were absent/unavailable, especially if it was supposed to
operate unsupervised for years or decades. What would you program it
to watch for, or react to? What would your priority list be? Let's
say it's a 3 or 5 piece multi-element telescope, orbiting Sol at 20
light-hours, for convenience.

I can imagine having a telescope that isn't visited for decades, but I
can't imagine one that doesn't regularly communicate with some sort of
base station.

There's not much point having the telescope if it doesn't send back its
results, and if you've got the ability to communicate in that direction
you might as well communicate in both directions, sending new target
coordinates on a regular basis.

It's only fairly recently that the control of any existing space
telescopes have been configured to respond rapidly. Before the search
for GRB Afterglows, it was typical for their schedules to be determined
weeks in advance. The addition of a 20 hour delay wouldn't be
significant.

The list of things that astronomers want to look at changes as new
theories are developed. It would be really silly to have a wonderfully
powerful deep space telescope, and develop a brilliant new theory about
how observations of newly discovered patterns in the spiral arms of
Seyfert Galaxies could tell us more about the origins of the universe,
but not be able to tell the telescope to make those observations.

--
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure
.

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