WEEKLY WHINE

There's a telescope for you

Well, bad news for Hubble Space Telescope fans. Looks like NASA won't be running a HST repair mission, human or robotic. So whenever those other gyroscopes go down, that means you won't be getting any more HST pictures.

What can be done about this conundrum? Well, you can sit around and wait for the James Webb Space Telescope. You can use your imagination and make the Chandra X Ray Observatory, XMM/Newton, or Spitzer Space Telescope images look like HST's. Or you can simply break out the adaptive optics.

Here at GoobNet, though, we're not content to do any of that. That's right, we've unleashed the GoobNet Special Projects Enhancement and Enforcement Division [SPEED] and sent them in search of new types of space telescopes. But they said they didn't want to. Fortunately, they ended up agreeing to it after we cut off their expense account.

JRST: JOEL ROBINSON SPACE TELSCOPE

This is a low altitude Earth orbiter, following the mission of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. This mission will scan for gamma ray bursts throughout the sky, instantly reporting anything it detects to a ground based network of dedicated observatories, which will follow up on all reports. This is a unique opportunity to create a global gamma ray burst tracking network.

From the press release announcing the name: "The Joel Robinson Space Telescope is named for Joel Hodgson's character on Mystery Science Theater 3000, who always conducted himself with the utmost dignity and comedic timing. He also had a ground support network with which he could communicate instantaneously, so we felt that this mission would be a wonderful way to honour his contributions to the lampooning of poor filmmaking. In addition, midway through the fifth year of the primary mission, the mission will be renamed the Mike Nelson Space Telescope."

RFBRI: REALLY FREAKING BIG RADIO INTERFEROMETER

This mission is made up of three radio telescopes, each forty metres in aperture. They'll all be orbiting beyond Neptune's orbit, creating an interferometer with a baseline of over sixty AU. This mission offers the potential for unprecedented resolution in radio astronomy, with detailed studies of the Milky Way's core high on the list of objectives.

From the press release announcing the name: "We thought about the Fat Albert Radio Interferometer, but in the end, Really Freaking Big Radio Interferometer was deemed to express the mission's ideals more straightforwardly."

AGLT: AL GORE LUNAR TELESCOPE

We'll set this one up on the far side of the Moon. It will have a twelve metre aperture and will observe in the ultraviolet, visible, and infrared ranges. The mission objective will be to characterise the distribution of early galaxies, with special emphasis on things that explode and spew stuff along really fast jets.

From the press release announcing the name: "The Al Gore Lunar Telescope is named for former Vice President Al Gore, whom we felt sorry for because his favourite satellite, Triana, got cancelled a few years back. The Al Gore Lunar Telescope will operate under the same values under which Al Gore operated his political career. In particular, AGLT will excel in standing motionless for hours or even days at a time, staring at one thing without so much as a cookie break."