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| Early Days Gerard P. Kuiper Early Graduate Students Missions to the Moon |
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George Coyne, on the need for ground-based support Space exploration began to boom, because of money from NASA and all, but it did not detract from ground-based research. They went together. We realized very early in the beginning that we’d need large telescopes on the surface of the Earth as well as telescopes in space, experiments in space. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket. They go together. The reason they go together is a very simple and technical one. The Earth’s atmosphere does two things that astronomers don’t like about it. One is it disturbs the light. If you look over a hot road on a summer’s day, you’re driving down and you see a shimmering light, it’s because the road is causing the light beams to [shimmer]. The Earth’s atmosphere does the same thing. The second thing it does is it acts as a filter. There’s some ultraviolet radiation—thank God for us—and some radio waves that never get through the atmosphere. The conclusion from that, those two things, is that there are some things you have to do in space, because you’d never get the information here. The Earth’s atmosphere filters it out. But there are many things that you can do on the Earth’s surface without going to the expense of getting outside the atmosphere so that you can get away from this dancing light. |
What has developed over the years is what we call adaptive optics, which is the way that a ground-based telescope, by certain techniques, can sense the perturbations of the Earth’s atmosphere, send them to a computer; a computer can tell the telescope mirrors, the secondary and the primary, what to do and where to correct for these perturbations. At times, to 98 percent or so, a telescope on the surface of the Earth can act just as well as a telescope in space; and it costs, at least in those days, 500 times more to work in space than it does on the ground. You don’t spend that extra money if you don’t have to, if you have these special techniques. The excitement of the early years was that space was going to become more and more an important component, but we realized right at the beginning that it had to be linked to very high-quality large telescopes. |
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