I had an idea on the drive home today.
I listen to audiobooks during my commute (when I drive, anyways. I usually don’t drive, but I missed my bus this morning and so was forced to take to the car (some people were blocking in my parking space, making me late for my short drive to the bus station (so I do actually drive every day but usually only for 7 minutes, not for the 45+ it takes me to get all the way to work) and I missed my bus by only like 30 seconds)), usually I try to listen to crappy genre fiction, as it’s sufficient to stop be getting horribly bored, but it’s not good enough that I wish I’d read the book for real. Sometimes I err too far on the side of crappiness, a recent piece of spy-thriller garbage by Jack Higgins being an example. Other times I listen to something really good, like the Bill Bryson book I listened to last year.
Anyways, now I’m listening to a non-fiction book that’s about amateur astronomy, and it’s falling nicely into the zone between good and bad. It keeps me occupied, but if my mind wanders for a while and I stop paying attention to what’s being said, then it’s no big deal. He talks a lot about how amateur astronomers help the progress of professional astronomers, largely by their willingness to do regular observations of things that the big telescopes simply don’t have the time to handle. They also do more all-sky surveying, which is why amateurs usually find new comets and things like that.
The problem is that the goals of the amateur astronomer, which are to have a good time looking at the stars, or to get interesting pictures, or to find something new, are rarely coincident with the goals of the professional scientist astronomical community, which values regular observation of either specific objects over a certain time frame, or systematic surveys of the whole sky over a relatively short time span. Sometimes the professionals manage to convince the amateurs to help them out, but that’s often more difficult that it’s worth.
So, my idea was this: we develop an installable telescope system that’s cheap to produce (most important), remotely-controlled, rugged and sufficiently precise for scientific measurement. We then install these small scopes on roofs all over the world. They would be bolted down relatively permanently, wired to the power systems of the buildings they’re installed on, and controlled from a central system that could coordinate their efforts to maximize value for all users.
Just like any major telescope, people could sign up for time to observe any object they choose at any time they choose. Unlike major telescopes (once there were a reasonable number of these things around the world,) you wouldn’t have to wait forever to get your observations made, and the costs would be much lower. Of course the light-gathering power of any individual system would be relatively low and they wouldn’t have all the fancy anti-turbulence correction facilities of the major observatories, but for a lot of kinds of research, that kind of thing isn’t particularly important. Weather would cease to be a major concern; a given heavenly body should always be visible from somewhere (in the right part of the globe at any rate) at any given time and so if one telescope is obscured by clouds, another can take its work. Even more excitingly, this kind of system could be put to work doing a variety of VLBI-type tasks that could really revolutionize some aspects of modern astronomical observation.
Of course there are tons of potentials problems: is it even possible to make something affordable that’s sufficiently rugged and self-maintaining? The cost of keeping up a worldwide maintenance/calibration team would surely swamp the project. Even installation would be a major problem, although that kind of thing might be able to be contracted out to, say, cable television companies. The system for controlling these things would be a real beast to develop, although once the hardware is in place, solving the control problem is something that can be accomplished iteratively, and a very simple initial system I think would be an entirely tractable problem for a relatively small development team.
I think this is a good idea. I haven’t looked very hard, but I find it entirely reasonable to assume that someone out there is already working on something of this nature. What do y’all think? Is this just a pie-in-the-sky idea, or is this something that might really happen someday? Also, I can’t think of a good name for this. Any ideas? This being astronomy, a clever acronym would be appropriate.