Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Bets anyone?

re: Bets anyone?
Doug Ellison — (archived)

"Surely if the gravity issue was so bad on the moon, then we would have stopped making terrestrial scopes long ago, since it is so much worse here."

Building a scope to not deform under the gravity is easy enough - but requires a much heavier mirror. Consider the JWST mirror - in terms of kg/m^2 it's a tiny tiny proportion of the mass of any ground based scope.

The point was that your mirror has to be heavier - and thus you need a much larger LV, and thus it becomes much more expensive - in what is already a prohibatively expensive, and essentially pointless exercise.

As for research grade astronomical instruments being built from in-situ resources on the moon....not in your lifetime, my lifetime, or our grandchildrens lifetime - it's heavy industry
http://mirrorlab.as.arizona.edu/MISC.php?navi=castr

Doug

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