Quote:
Originally Posted by AussieTrooper
- But you’ll never ever discover a comet or a supernova or a nova or an asteroid or a Jupiter-strike again.
Rob, I politely beg to differ. Read my signature and you will see why.
Amateurs now have access to professional instruments that they could never afford by themselves. I see no reason that this won't continue in the future, with amateurs able to get telescope time on space or moon based instruments. After the 10,000the KBO is discovered, the professionals may lose interest, allowing amateurs to take over the reigns.
The then long gone Hubble may well be viewed the same way that 18th century refractors are now.
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Good points Ben and you could well be right.
My concept is that it's downlink speeds and processing power that's limiting professional surveys and leaving a sizeable chunk of data gathering to amateurs. If you crank up speeds/power to ridiculous (normal if you live in the future LOL
) and chuck in developing satellite & camera technologies, then you could see cheap deep round-the-clock space-based surveys that'll pick up everything in all filters etc and the fully-automated pipeline will release results in near real-time.
They'll be unbeatable and it won't even be like today where you can still 'discover' things in survey databases (eg SOHO images, ASAS data etc) and hence my comment. But I could be 100% wrong - I think that might have happened once or twice before!!
Cheers -