Re:James Webb is fully deployed
by mlyle on Saturday January 08, 2022 @11:59PM
(#29860316)
> But do you really believe that with one little ole' telescope pointed at the freakin' universe you're going to reach a significant point of diminishing returns?
I believe that James Webb has some unique capabilities, and a whole lot of overlap with other instruments, too. For things that you can only do in infrared, we have Herschel's history of observations, and VISTA. Sure, JWST is bigger and up at L2, and will be better overall, but VISTA's instruments have some advantages.
Not to mention all the other telescopes and ways we have of studying the universe.
There's all kinds of other things the government has spent $3B on in the intervening development time that I'd trade for another JWST. But it's a bit moot, here: NASA didn't have another $3B to spend. If you made JWST $3B more expensive, you'd not get 2 telescopes instead of 1: you'd get 0, because JWST almost died because of cost overruns.
(And even if NASA had $3B more--- there's a lot of other things that might have been better to do with it than JWSTx2).
I believe that James Webb has some unique capabilities, and a whole lot of overlap with other instruments, too. For things that you can only do in infrared, we have Herschel's history of observations, and VISTA. Sure, JWST is bigger and up at L2, and will be better overall, but VISTA's instruments have some advantages.
Not to mention all the other telescopes and ways we have of studying the universe.
There's all kinds of other things the government has spent $3B on in the intervening development time that I'd trade for another JWST. But it's a bit moot, here: NASA didn't have another $3B to spend. If you made JWST $3B more expensive, you'd not get 2 telescopes instead of 1: you'd get 0, because JWST almost died because of cost overruns.
(And even if NASA had $3B more--- there's a lot of other things that might have been better to do with it than JWSTx2).