Author Topic: PLANETS Telescope: Building Toward Colossus  (Read 1540 times)

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Offline Doug Loss

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PLANETS Telescope: Building Toward Colossus
« on: May 15, 2017, 05:09:32 pm »
PLANETS Telescope: Building Toward Colossus

Let me call your attention to the PLANETS telescope, now seeking a funding boost through an ongoing Kickstarter campaign. Currently about halfway built, the PLANETS (Polarized Light from Atmospheres of Nearby ExtraTerrestrial Systems) instrument is located on the 10,000 meter Haleakala volcano on the island of Maui. When completed, it will be the world’s largest off-axis telescope (at 1.85 meters) for night-time planetary and exoplanetary science. And it’s part of a much larger, scalable effort to find life around nearby stars in as little as a decade.

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The PLANETS instrument will be optimized for studying the exo-atmospheres of the rocky planets in our own Solar System, but will also delve into the atmospheres and surfaces of bright nearby exoplanets and examine circumstellar disks in young stellar systems. It also sets the stage for biosignature detection as we begin to upgrade its scalable technologies.

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Offline Doug Loss

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Re: PLANETS Telescope: Building Toward Colossus
« Reply #1 on: May 16, 2017, 07:17:30 pm »
Colossus and SETI: Searching for Heat Signatures

Yesterday we looked at the PLANETS telescope, now under construction on the Haleakala volcano on the island of Maui. What will become the world’s largest off-axis telescope is considered a pathfinder, part of the progression of instruments that will take us through the array of sixteen 5-meter mirrors that will be called ExoLife Finder, itself to be followed by Colossus, an instrument comprised of 58 independent off-axis telescopes. Colossus will use ultra-thin mirror technologies and interferometric methods to achieve an effective resolution of 74 meters. And it will be optimized for detecting extrasolar life and extraterrestrial civilizations.

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Offline Gefn

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Re: PLANETS Telescope: Building Toward Colossus
« Reply #2 on: May 16, 2017, 08:09:24 pm »
It's stories like this that I wish I was good at math so I could have been an astronomer
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Offline minnesota_bound

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Re: PLANETS Telescope: Building Toward Colossus
« Reply #3 on: May 16, 2017, 09:46:56 pm »
74 meters = 2913.39 inches
Mt Palomar telescope is 200 inches

Offline Gefn

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Re: PLANETS Telescope: Building Toward Colossus
« Reply #4 on: May 16, 2017, 10:28:44 pm »
Welcome @minnesota_bound !

 :seeya:
Glad you found us.
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Offline Doug Loss

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Re: PLANETS Telescope: Building Toward Colossus
« Reply #5 on: May 17, 2017, 05:19:58 pm »
A ‘Census’ for Civilizations

We’ve been talking about the Colossus project, and the possibility that this huge (though remarkably lightweight) instrument could detect the waste heat of extraterrestrial civilizations. But what are the chances of this, if we work out the numbers based on the calculations the Colossus team is working with? After all, Frank Drake put together his famous equation as a way of making back-of-the-envelope estimates of SETI’s chances for success, working the numbers even though most of them at that time had to be no more than guesses.

Bear in mind as we talk about this that we’d like to arrive at a figure for the survival of a civilization, a useful calculation because we have no idea whether technology-driven cultures survive or destroy themselves. Civilizations may live forever, or they may die out relatively quickly, perhaps on a scale of thousands of years. Here Colossus can give us useful information.

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Offline Joe Wooten

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Re: PLANETS Telescope: Building Toward Colossus
« Reply #6 on: May 17, 2017, 05:53:21 pm »
When I hear about the Colossus Project, I think:



Offline Doug Loss

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Re: PLANETS Telescope: Building Toward Colossus
« Reply #8 on: May 18, 2017, 07:04:01 pm »
Detecting Photosynthesis on Exoplanets

Although many of the nearby stars we will study for signs of life are older than the Sun, we do not know how long it takes life to emerge or, for that matter, how likely it is to emerge at all. As we saw yesterday, that means plugging values into Drake-like equations to estimate the possibility of detecting an alien civilization. We can’t rule out the possibility that we are surrounded by planets teeming with non-sentient life, fecund worlds that have no heat-producing technologies to observe. Fortunately, we are developing the tools for detecting life of the simplest kinds, so that while a telescope of Colossus class can be used to detect technology-based heat signatures, it can also be put to work looking for simpler biomarkers.

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My political philosophy:

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3) Leave me alone!