[HN Gopher] NASA to launch space observatory that will map 450M ...
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NASA to launch space observatory that will map 450M galaxies
Author : gmays
Score : 261 points
Date : 2025-03-08 00:07 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nbcnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nbcnews.com)
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> four suitcase-sized satellites _
|
| Americans will use anything else but the metric system :)
| schainks wrote:
| Hey! I know exactly how many Stanley cups fit in four
| suitcases, you don't have to tell me twice.
|
| </s>
| malfist wrote:
| Wait, is this carry on sized or checked size?
|
| Is it delta's size limits, or are we following united or
| American Airlines? Or heaven forbid, alligent?
| niwtsol wrote:
| The PUNCH mission features four 140-pound small satellites,
| each about 1-by-2-by-3 feet in size.
|
| Or
|
| The PUNCH mission features four 63.5 kg small satellites, each
| about 0.3048 m x 0.6096 m x 0.9144 m in size.
|
| https://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2025/03/04/nasas-spherex-punc...
| Ao7bei3s wrote:
| About 30x60x90cm in size.
| shmageggy wrote:
| This is so cool, but I did not see a key piece of info in the
| article: does the ongoing operation of this mission fall under
| NASA's science budget and therefore at risk of cuts and defunding
| under Trump [1]?
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/white-house-may-
| seek-t...
| ddon wrote:
| Yep, it looks like it will be cut and closed, which is truly
| unfortunate. It's disappointing to see that science nor
| innovation are not a priority for this administration. And this
| doge cutting of funding or even shutting down important
| projects will have long-term consequences, impacting research,
| education, and technological advancements that benefit
| everyone.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| This is a proposal (not final) budget to be sent to congress.
| What congress eventually allocates is what matters.
| jeffgreco wrote:
| Not according to the current presidential administration.
| Impoundment is their stated goal.
| connicpu wrote:
| This one is planned to launch on Falcon so I wouldn't be too
| surprised if it's one project the administration spares.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Everything launches on a Falcon these days. No one else can
| catch up in terms of safety cost or speed.
| gibolt wrote:
| SpaceX is going to pass whatever company is launching
| Falcon in short order, leaving them in the dust
| niwtsol wrote:
| The Falcon 9 is a SpaceX rocket
| numpad0 wrote:
| I'm not sure how to make out of comments like this. Is
| SpaceX actually launching customer payloads under $50m or
| whatever? Because, unless they are, it won't be long before
| JAXA/MHI starts selling H3 at half the cost of H-IIA, which
| is already like 15t to LEO for $67m at 150 JPY/USD, which
| leaves F9 _reusable_ barely competitive in price. I don 't
| know what India or China charge for foreign customers, but
| is it really reasonable to expect worse deal than
| Mitsubishi from them? ...
|
| Superheavy-Starship reusable launches at F9 price _would_
| completely destroy everything in space space, but so far
| the only things it had disrupted are itself and airline
| services under its flightpath. And even F9 is starting to
| show increasingly clear signs of repetitive "old space"
| scrubs as NASA gets more disrupted.
|
| Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or it
| that just hand wavy glance away one now?
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| > Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or
| it that just hand wavy glance away one now?
|
| The $67m figure is the same one I'm finding for Falcon 9
| (and it can carry loads 40% heavier). That made me think
| they were matching each other on price to stay
| competitive in the market and that seems correct as the
| internal costs I'm seeing for SpaceX Falcon 9 launches
| are estimated around $15mil, meaning they have a large
| margin from which to come down from.
|
| > it won't be long before JAXA/MHI starts selling H3 at
| half the cost of H-IIA
|
| SpaceX doesn't stand still. It's weird to think that in
| several years SpaceX will be in the same place (relying
| on Falcon 9) yet JAXA, etc will have improved
| dramatically.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > SpaceX doesn't stand still.
|
| So are they launching F9 at $67m? Or do you merely
| _expect_ SpaceX to _eventually_ price match? Not that MHI
| is selling a lot of slots, but still. Quoted payload
| figures is also within ballparks.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| They are actually doing launches as low as $62 million
| (as of 2024). They also have enormous margin to lower
| this cost because even the _upper-bound_ estimate by
| industry analysts on the Falcon 9 launch cost for SpaceX
| is only $28 million.
|
| Source: https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-
| spacex/#elemento...
| panick21_ wrote:
| I'm sorry no, you should spend some time actually
| understanding the industry.
|
| JAXA builds a tiny amount of rockets, almost exclusively
| for their own use. They have never been a significant
| player and its very unlikely that will change anytime
| soon.
|
| Its pure fantasy to suggest otherwise. And even if they
| could reliably hit these prices at commercial launch
| scale, Falcon 9 could easily lower their prices if real
| competitors actually existed.
|
| If H3 was such a dynamic thread as you suggest, why did
| Amazon not buy 100s of launches from them. They bought
| launches from every SpaceX competitor, but not Japan.
|
| > I don't know what India or China charge for foreign
| customers, but is it really reasonable to expect worse
| deal than Mitsubishi from them? ...
|
| China isn't really relevant. Western stuff is just not
| going to fly from China.
|
| India used to do more commercial stuff, but SpaceX
| Rideshare is far, far, far more popular.
|
| The reality is, India large rockets, like Japan, is
| mostly build for their own program, they don't really
| have that much access capability.
| jajko wrote:
| Costs are largely meaningless when talking about global
| situation and other nations and their strategic interests.
| Europe will move fully to ESA for anything actually
| important, China and India have their own stuff too.
| Private satellites, sure why not if companies are OK with
| risking of getting their payload removed at last minute
| because somebody again bruised musk's ego.
|
| Business can't be done in an environment with zero trust,
| doesn't matter how much better the offer looks on paper.
| That trust with spacex is gone for good.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| > Costs are largely meaningless
|
| Costs are never meaningless when you're talking about
| technical projects that cost billions of dollars.
|
| > trust with spacex is gone for good.
|
| Sorry to pop your bubble, but they launched 134 rockets
| with payloads last year and they all made it to their
| orbits successfully except for one of their own starlink
| payloads. This is more than 90% of all launches that
| occurred last year.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| > 90%
|
| You mean 50%, there were 253 successful orbital launches
| last year
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_in_spaceflight
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, the launch will go through, but SpaceX doesn't see any
| recurring revenue from later operations, and I wouldn't put
| it past the current administration to cut NASA's budget such
| that continuing operations are affected.
| ImJamal wrote:
| Trump created the Space Force so he will presumably want some
| amount of funding for rockets and what not. If Space Force
| fails it would make him look bad after all.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Notwithstanding what you said, it is worth noting that the US
| Space Force has been a long time in the making:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force
| ImJamal wrote:
| Trump is the one who actually decided to go through with
| the creation of a distinct branch rather than having it as
| a command. I think it is fair to say he created it.
|
| There are all sorts of politicians and military members who
| advocate for a distinct Cyber branch of the military
| instead of Cyber Command. If a politician ends up doing
| that, then he should get credit for creating it even though
| it has been a long time coming.
| mmooss wrote:
| > distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber
| Command
|
| It's not 'instead', it's adding a cyber branch to a
| different org chart. There are two major org charts in
| the US military:
|
| The services, such as Army, Navy, Space Force, etc.,
| which are generally defined by domain (land, sea, orbit)
| and whose role is to recruit, organize, train, and equip
| forces - to prepare them, but not to deploy or command
| them in operations.
|
| The combatant commands, which are defined by geography -
| such as Africa Command, Indo-Pacific Command - and
| sometimes by geography-independent domains, such as as
| Space Command or Cyber Command. The combatant commands
| deploy the resources provided by the services in various
| combinations. Modern conflicts generally require
| resources from multiple services/domains working
| _jointly_.
|
| It makes some sense - you want domain experts to train
| and equip them for their domain, then you must
| necessarily deploy them jointly. Who should organize,
| train, and equip sea-born forces? Probably you want the
| Navy to do that, not the Army. Who should organize,
| train, and equip electronic domain forces (I hate the
| term 'cyber')? Do you want your IT organization
| organized, trained, and equipped (think of the importance
| of each step) by the US Marine Corps, or maybe by some
| actual researchers, engineers, and experienced managers?
| kelnos wrote:
| That really has nothing to do with whether or not operations
| for this project will be funded over the next several years.
| eleveriven wrote:
| That's a good question. Given how frequently NASA's science
| budget gets caught in political crosswinds, it's definitely a
| concern
| dylan604 wrote:
| "The SPHEREx mission <snip> will map the entire sky four times
| over two years, offering scientists a chance to study how
| galaxies form and evolve, and providing a window into how the
| universe came to be."
|
| So each object will be scanned ~6 months from the previous scan.
| How much evolving within the universe will be noticeable within
| that 2 year run? My gut response is not much, but that's why we
| do the science to see the changes.
|
| "designed to map the celestial sky in 102 infrared colors "
|
| So I'm guessing the coolant used to make IR scanning possible
| will be the limiting factor on operational time span. This
| article didn't say where this satellite will be parked either,
| but wikipedia[0] shows it to be a geosync orbit. Would have been
| interesting to be able to design a replaceable coolant module to
| extend the observations to really make seeing the evolution
| possible. Obviously complexity adds to cost and design time, so
| of course they didn't. Just dreaming
|
| As an example, the study of the stars orbiting around SagA* are
| very revealing, but have required > 10 years of observations.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPHEREx
| perihelions wrote:
| They're talking about galaxy evolution in the early universe,
| over timescales of millions of years. Statistics measured
| across the (large) sample group, not within one galaxy. Scroll
| down to _" It will classify galaxies according to redshift
| accuracy..."_
| nashashmi wrote:
| Right, at that scale, For a galaxy to move a fraction of a
| centimeter will take a thousand years. So not much will be
| missed in a gap of 6 months.
| queuebert wrote:
| This is nonsensical. Do you mean a tiny movement in the
| field of view, which should be measured in angular
| distance?
|
| Or do you mean actual motion through the universe, in which
| case the galaxies are moving at hundreds of kms per second,
| which means they would move billions of kms in 6 mos.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Yes, field of view. I am considering 1 cm to mean 2-3
| light years.
| Sanzig wrote:
| Why would coolant be a consumable? These things are usually
| cooled with Stirling cryocoolers which are closed systems.
| perihelions wrote:
| I did a quick search and it seems there is neither?
|
| - _" SPHEREx relies on an entirely passive cooling system --
| no electricity or coolants are used during normal
| operations"_
|
| https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/6-things-to-know-about-
| spherex...
|
| edit to add:
|
| - _" The telescope is passively cooled to below 80 K in low-
| Earth orbit by three nested V-groove radiators. An additional
| radiator cools the long wavelength focal plane temperature
| below 60 K to reduce detector dark current."_
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11017v1
| dylan604 wrote:
| The Spitzer used passive cooling, but only as a method to
| reduce the amount of coolant required. It still needed a
| coolant.
|
| "One of the most important advances of this redesign was an
| Earth-trailing orbit.[1] Cryogenic satellites that require
| liquid helium (LHe, T [?] 4 K) temperatures in near-Earth
| orbit are typically exposed to a large heat load from
| Earth, and consequently require large amounts of LHe
| coolant, which then tends to dominate the total payload
| mass and limits mission life. Placing the satellite in
| solar orbit far from Earth allowed innovative passive
| cooling. The sun shield protected the rest of the
| spacecraft from the Sun's heat, the far side of the
| spacecraft was painted black to enhance passive radiation
| of heat, and the spacecraft bus was thermally isolated from
| the telescope. All of these design choices combined to
| drastically reduce the total mass of helium needed,
| resulting in an overall smaller and lighter payload,
| resulting in major cost savings, but with a mirror the same
| diameter as originally designed. This orbit also simplified
| telescope pointing, but did require the NASA Deep Space
| Network for communications"[0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescope
| perihelions wrote:
| I found an explanation of the "v-groove" radiator geometry,
| if anyone else was curious about it:
|
| (.pdf) https://ttu-
| ir.tdl.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/71aee1e9-3...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Every system I'm familiar with that used liquid nitrogen to
| cool the IR instruments has had a operational lifespan based
| on the coolant. JWST is one such. "The coolant will slowly
| vaporize, limiting the lifetime of the instrument from as
| short as a few months to a few years at most."[0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
| perihelions wrote:
| You've misread your source article--what you've quoted is
| not a description of Webb.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Does that really change anything?
| kadoban wrote:
| Well, it doesn't apply to either JWST or the subject of
| the article, so kind of feels like it's worth mentioning.
|
| It doesn't change your specific, exact point (about
| previous cooling systems you were aware of), but it makes
| the conversation a lot less likely to confuse people IMO.
| jessriedel wrote:
| As another comment mentions, SPHEREx is passively cooled. But
| fwiw, plenty of infrared space telescopes use consumable
| coolant:
|
| > Notable infrared missions that carried consumable cryogen
| include IRAS (1983), ISO (1995-1998), Spitzer (2003-2009 in
| cryo mode), Herschel (2009-2013), WISE (2009-2011 in cryo
| mode), and Planck (2009-2013). Each relied on a finite liquid
| helium (or solid hydrogen) supply to keep detectors cold and
| reverted to a warmer operating mode or ended once their
| coolant was depleted.
| perihelions wrote:
| Notably those were all far-infrared telescopes, which need
| even lower temperatures (liquid helium) to escape thermal
| noise.
| niwtsol wrote:
| To answer three of your questions:
|
| - It is passively cooled rather than using an expendable
| coolant- "SPHEREx relies on an entirely passive cooling system
| -- no electricity or coolants are used, simplifying the
| spacecraft's design and operational needs."
|
| - It is a Medium-Class Explorers (MIDEX) mission -
| Investigations characterized by definition, development,
| mission operations, and data analysis costs not to exceed $180
| to $200 million total cost to NASA. I think the cost of ground
| support eats into the budget length. The original estimate for
| project was $241M, so it was a large MIDEX
|
| - It is in a Polar orbit around Earth at the day-night
| (terminator) line
|
| https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/press-kits/spherex/
|
| https://explorers.gsfc.nasa.gov/missions.html
|
| https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/02/14/nasa-selects-mission-t...
| dylan604 wrote:
| ah, I misread the Orbital Parameters on the wiki. that day-
| night orbit is also a LEO which makes it even more possible
| to do a manned mission for upgrades. Oh, wait, we no longer
| have a shuttle for those types of missions.
| nine_k wrote:
| Even a Dragon could bring enough hardware and a crew for a
| small upgrade or repair (to say nothing of the upcoming
| Starship).
| ericcumbee wrote:
| Dragon lacks a Remote Manipulator System (Robot Arm) and
| a airlock. things that make servicing objects in space a
| lot easier. Im sure somewhere at NASA or SpaceX there is
| rough set of specs on what a shuttle like starship would
| look like complete with payload bay, robot arm, and eva
| airlock.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| The complete specs of the arm may now belong to a hostile
| nation.
| totetsu wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm#
| Frederation wrote:
| A nation pushing back against the morons in Washington.
|
| Hardly hostile. Unless you poke the bear.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you're alluding to Russia, they've had them. They even
| failed in making their version of a shuttle. With what
| money would they do anything with now?
|
| If you're alluding to China, they probably had the data
| from the Russians anyways.
|
| Otherwise, I'm out of guesses to your vagueness.
| taggart wrote:
| Canada built the shuttle arms:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm
| sillywalk wrote:
| > They even failed in making their version of a shuttle.
|
| Nitpick: It was sort of successful. They built a shuttle,
| and it successfully flew a single (un-crewed) mission of
| a couple orbits. The collapse of the USSR / lack of
| funding killed it.
| vkou wrote:
| It's amazing how all it takes is a few threats of
| annexation, and for GOP thought-leaders like Ben Shapiro
| to start talking about enslaving you[1] to work on the
| Panama Canal to make another country rethink its
| relationship with you.
|
| Absolute animals. As is anyone else carrying water for
| these politics. _There 's no excuse for it._
|
| If you had anything at all to do with putting these
| clowns in power - _reign them back in_. They are supposed
| to work for you. Remind them of this.
|
| [1] https://x.com/benshapiro/status/1876800394900152483?l
| ang=en
| nine_k wrote:
| Sorry, "rein them in". Reign is about royal power; rein
| is about controlling a horse. And we definitely don't
| want any monarchs here.
| nick12r55t1 wrote:
| Can dragon launch to a polar orbit and safely deorbit
| from a polar orbit?
| perihelions wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fram2
| mturmon wrote:
| Remember, it is passively cooled (a major design plus and,
| I assume, part of why it was able to achieve the cost it
| did). So there would be no need for a manned mission. And
| in fact, at that cost, it wouldn't make sense anyway.
| pklausler wrote:
| Possibly stupid question: how does this polar orbit _stay_
| over the terminator? And how is the terminator defined for a
| polar orbit here, since both the north and south poles are on
| the terminator only at the equinoxes?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >how does this polar orbit stay over the terminator?
|
| Because it's launched at a angle _greater_ than a straight
| north-south 90 degree orbit, so orbital precession will
| correctly follow the terminator. Depending on the orbital
| altitude this can be more than 140 degrees:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
| pixl97 wrote:
| >How much evolving within the universe will be noticeable
| within that 2 year run?
|
| Anton Petrov had a recent episode about rapid transformations
| in large supergiant stars, so there are some parts of space
| that can rapidly evolve.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHvV9ewPY7s
| computerex wrote:
| Thank you for awesome information!
| mturmon wrote:
| A nearby (excellent) comment
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43338459) gives further
| context, but: the 6-month revisit period is just an artifact of
| the Earth-orbit-based sky scanning strategy. In 6 months the
| satellite, precessing at 1 degree/day, and facing away from the
| sun during data collection, will scan the sky completely. (See
| Fig 1 of the paper [0]).
|
| So in particular, the 6-month period is not to revisit these
| distant galaxies more than once to observe spectral changes.
| The strategy, indeed, is to "stack" the multiple exposures to
| beat down noise. (Fig.6 of [0], top left).
|
| It is possible that they have designed the system so that it
| could produce "just good enough" results in 6 months, with one
| complete scan. This is called a "threshold mission" and it
| would only be described in the full proposal.
|
| I looked through the rest of the science cases (which are
| secondary to the driving case of this mission), and none of
| them seem to be reliant on revisits. (But open to correction on
| this.)
|
| [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.4872
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Any chance there will be enough "parallax" in the 6-month
| period to get a stereo-distancing map for the galaxies? Or do
| we already have that from red-shift, relative luminance or
| some other means?
| perihelions wrote:
| Andromeda (the nearest) is 2e19 km away and has a relative
| motion of 300 km/s in the radial direction. If we assume
| the tangential motion is similar, that's 5e9 km of
| tangential displacement over 6 months, for a total angular
| displacement of 5e-5 arcseconds (50 microarcseconds).
|
| That's well below the precision of every telescope.
| (Admittedly GAIA, the one designed for parallax
| measurements, comes close, but its techniques only work on
| very bright point-source objects).
|
| I think these articles answer your question:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43151943 ( _" Part two
| of Grant Sanderson's video with Terry Tao on the cosmic
| distance ladder (mathstodon.xyz)"_, 99 comments)
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Most things astronomers observe do not change much over the
| course of 6 months. For comparison, it takes the Sun about 200
| million years to orbit around the center of the Milky Way once,
| so a galaxy like the Milky Way would hardly change in 6 months.
|
| However, there is an entire field of astronomy, called "time-
| domain astronomy," that deals with things that do change on
| human timescales. There are pulsating stars, supernovae,
| galaxies with rapidly accreting central black holes, and many
| other types of objects. Surveys that focus on the "time domain"
| have survey strategies that are tailored to whatever type of
| object they're looking at. For example, if you're looking for
| planets that transit in front of their host stars, you should
| look every ~30 minutes or so, because planet transits only last
| around that amount of time.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| It always surprises me how my enthusiasm for scientific discovery
| is affected by fears of a dystopian future. My understanding is
| that with red shift calibration here we'll get a much better idea
| of the 'when' in terms of various galactic structures emerged,
| that might give us an interesting idea of where we are in the
| life-cycle of the Milky Way. But the observation of water
| signatures will be the most interesting to me. Presumably there
| is a _lot_ of water tied up in comets and such, but will SPHERE
| be able to detect those signatures near planets?
| turtletontine wrote:
| The galactic and extragalactic science cases (meaning, "stuff
| in the Milky Way" vs "everything inside the Milky Way") are
| actually pretty unrelated here.
|
| We actually have quite a good idea about the history of the
| Milky Way and all the smaller galaxies that it's eaten (and
| will eat, such as our main current satellites the Small and
| Large Magellanic Clouds). We're even pretty sure that the MW
| merged with another large galaxy about 11bil year ago,
| sometimes called "Kraken"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken_galaxy?wprov=sfti1.
| SPHEREx is not interested in any of that, and it looks like
| it's galactic science will mostly be mapping out where clouds
| of ice crystals are in the Milky Way. SPHEREx has very low
| spatial resolution (about 6 arcsec), so it's certainly not
| observing any exoplanets, but that's the trade off with an all-
| sky mission like this.
|
| One of the big drivers of the extragalactic science, though, is
| looking for signatures of cosmic inflation in the distribution
| of galaxies on large scales. IMO this is by far the most
| interesting science case, and will be genuinely exciting and
| novel. Its survey design doesn't give it great resolution, but
| it's amazing IR spectrophometry will let it map the rough
| distribution of galaxies at redshifts we haven't been able to
| survey before. This is called intensity mapping
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I can't really get what you meant by "dystopian future" in this
| context. In my understanding that is a human caused concept.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Hard for me to parse as well -- but I think OP is talking
| broadly about humans being able to keep our shit together
| long enough to be able to reach other solar systems before we
| outgrow our own.
| eleveriven wrote:
| As for water detection, I'd imagine SPHEREx will be better
| suited for large-scale mapping rather than pinpointing water on
| specific planets
| layer8 wrote:
| The Wikipedia article has more useful information:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPHEREx
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| Do these missions ever build back-up hardware? What if the probe
| is lost because of a lunch mishap, or there is a malfunction
| during the deploy (see Viasat VS3 antenna deploy failure).
|
| It is an added cost, but it cannot be that much compared to the
| overall R&D/tooling/launch/ect cost.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _What if the probe is lost because of a lunch mishap_
|
| Well, hopefully the people who are building the probe aren't
| eating their lunches on top of it.
|
| (Yes, I know. Fun typo nonetheless.)
| mandevil wrote:
| Into the 1970's, NASA did that. That was why there was Viking 1
| and 2, Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, etc. Since then,
| however, NASA has stopped doing that. It became a balancing
| act- yes, 0 to 1 is much more expensive than 1 to 2, (1 to n is
| not quite as cheap as it is with software but it's still much
| cheaper than 0->1), but NASA Science is in the business of
| answering questions. The question is, will building, launching,
| and operating (the expensive part) two Parker Solar Probe's and
| two Juno's answer more questions than building one Parker Solar
| Probe, one Juno, and one OSIRIS-Rex? Almost certainly the three
| different probes answers more questions than two copies of two
| different probes. So once launch vehicle reliability got to be
| good enough that the fear of total mission failure went down
| low enough (1), duplicate missions basically went away.
|
| 1: Edited to add: this is actually tied into the Space Shuttle
| in interesting ways. See T.A. Heppenheimer, _The Space Shuttle
| Decision_ for why the STS became the sole space launch system
| for all of the US Government. Of course if it's manned it's
| reliability has to be so high that you don't have to worry
| about loss of payload, so building two copies of it was no
| longer necessary.
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| Great answer.
|
| > Of course if it's manned it's reliability has to be so high
| that you don't have to worry about loss of payload, so
| building two copies of it was no longer necessary.
|
| I wasn't expecting a space shuttle tie in, but of course
| there would be. They sure had to promise a lot to get that
| thing off the ground.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| To be honest, I was expecting Elon and DOGE to have completely
| gutted NASA by now, while at the same time allocating more
| contracts to SpaceX.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'd imagine he's currently more focused on FAA to get them off
| his back about Starship issues.
|
| Awarding new contracts doesn't require gutting NASA first, so
| he can get to it later once the FAA has bent the knee
| dakr wrote:
| They're working on it. NASA HQ has already cut their "Office of
| the Chief Scientist" (among others) and the current proposal is
| to cut 50% of the science budget (which would effectively kill
| it, it's already been squeezed).
| d--b wrote:
| This is a SpaceX contract
| apawloski wrote:
| The launch vehicle is SpaceX, but the science and mission
| operations are NASA/JPL.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| And to add to that, DOGE has been known to cancel contracts
| where the money has already been paid (so we're effective
| paying for nothing); SpaceX already has what it needs from
| this contract and has nothing to lose by cancelling the
| mission now.
| dylan604 wrote:
| SpaceX might be the one that takes it to orbit, but that's
| the end of their involvement. It would be one of the NASA run
| locations that would be controlling the craft, receiving the
| data, analyzing the data, etc. The JWST is not a French
| contract just because it caught a ride on an Ariane rocket.
|
| To call that a SpaceX contract is a very myopic view.
| metalman wrote:
| 450M is somewhere between .1% and 0 % of the total number of
| galaxies in the observable universe, so I am laying claim to 50,
| galaxies, which is hopefully a full set of galaxie types, but
| with a little haggling and trading, buying and selling galaxies I
| can figure that out later. My Mom says as a child she sent away
| and got title to one sqare inch of the moon, but it was a much
| smaller universe then, especialy before inflation.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Imagine the value after cosmic inflation kicks in
| eleveriven wrote:
| It's pretty incredible to think that we're at a point in human
| history where we can map 450 million galaxies and probe the
| origins of the universe
| Tepix wrote:
| The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging
| Survey has recorded more than one billion galaxies.
|
| But there are _many_ more galaxies in the observable universe
| ... somewhere between 2 and 20 trillion
| jajko wrote:
| > But there are many more galaxies in the observable universe
| ... somewhere between 2 and 20 trillion
|
| A bit less officially, need to remove one zero [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy#:~:text=It%20is%20es
| tim...
| Tepix wrote:
| There are more recent estimates going from 6-20 trillion
| now: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/galaxies-in-
| universe...
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| That article is going beyond the observable universe,
| other comments were talking about within it.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I feel infinitesimally small.
| igleria wrote:
| me too, but big things have small beginnings!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And to think I assumed Astronomy was a stagnant field some
| decades ago. I have no idea why I thought that. Maybe that
| optical resolution from ground-based telescopes was not going
| to advance orders of magnitudes? Maybe I didn't think the
| sciences would continue to get money for space telescopes?
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Astronomy has been in a golden age for the last 35 years,
| based on:
|
| 1. Digital cameras, and the computers to analyze images.
|
| 2. Space telescopes (Hubble Space Telescope, the first large
| space telescope, only launched in 1990).
|
| 3. The building of massive ground-based telescopes. Before
| 1990, the largest telescope had a mirror diameter of 6
| meters. Now, multiple 30-meter telescopes are under
| construction. Collecting power goes with the square of the
| diameter, so this is an increase of 25 times in collecting
| power!
|
| 4. Very recently, the development of gravitational-wave
| interferometers, which allow astronomers to observe a totally
| new type of radiation.
| nuccy wrote:
| To add to the list (the order is arbitrary):
|
| 5. Advances in the multi-messenger observations, where
| apart of photons and gravitational waves, astronomers can
| detects also neutrinos with specialized neutrino detectors,
| e.g.: IceCube [a], though there are many more of those [b].
|
| 6. Advances in very-long-baseline interferometry [c] using
| a globe-sized array of radio-telescopes, like Event Horizon
| Telescope [d]
|
| [a]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
|
| [b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector or here
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_neutrino_experiments
|
| [c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-
| baseline_interferome...
|
| [d] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| And one more:
|
| 7. The LISA mission is underway to build a space-based
| detector for gravitational waves at the 0.1hz region,
| whereas LIGO is sensitive around the 500hz region. 500hz
| corresponds to inspiraling stellar mass black holes.
| 0.1hz corresponds to inspiraling supermassive black
| holes. Think about the most powerful subwoofer the laws
| of physics allow, given the maximum amount of mass
| density in a volume and the speed of light.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_
| Ant...
| nicholasbraker wrote:
| "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-
| bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's long way down
| the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
| arisAlexis wrote:
| I call it here, Musk will cut it before they do it
| keepsweet wrote:
| I highly doubt it, but is that plausible?
| perihelions wrote:
| https://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2025/03/12/signal-acquired-na... (
| _" Signal Acquired: NASA's SPHEREx Begins Science Mission"_)
|
| Success!
| ourmandave wrote:
| Like the myth Inuit have 100 words for snow, how many words do
| astronomers have for big?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| aquisition of signal! https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-
| launches-missions-to-...
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