Mar 4th, 2017: Magellan

[xoxoxoBruce]

The Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990. After a couple hiccups, it's given us space-boner inducing photographs beyond
our wildest dreams. But most of the time it was doing science most people wouldn’t fathom.
Dogs live a dozen years, cats half that again, but Hubble has been humping away for 27 years and is tired. In October of 2018
the James Webb Space Telescope will launch to become the new star of stars. The problem is these telescopes are incredibly
difficult and expensive to build, launch and service.



Scopes like Hubble and James Webb have a long line of astronomers waiting years, while jostling and politicking for peep time.
The obvious solution is more telescopes but with the aforementioned expense, that won’t happen. All telescopes on the earth,
even on the highest peaks, suffer from the distortion (twinkle twinkle little star), of our atmosphere. But most people feel it’s
better to be able to breath than see stars.
Well damnitall this is the 21st century, you know flying cars, sex robots, wrist radios, sex robots, holodecks, sex robots.
It seems the astronomers, and computer geeks have been working on it... yeah, the sexrobots too.

High on a mountain top in old Chile, they’re building a telescope the stars to see.

The Giant Magellan Telescope is expected to be completed by 2025, but may start working sooner with only four of the seven
mirrors it’s getting. In space, the GMT would have about 10 times the resolving power of Hubble, but on the ground… twinkle.
Nerds to the rescue! Adaptive optics to fix the twinkle, secondary mirrors will be flexible, and computer-controlled actuators will
warp them hundreds of times per second to de-twinkle the image. The telescope will use six lasers to produce artificial stars in
the sky for calibrating. Magellan will get close to the same resolution as if it were in space.

Science, bitches!