A friend of mine is a PhD student in Astronomy and he sometimes observes at Arecibo in Puerto Rico (a single radio telescope). And his collaboration will generate so much data that it's faster and cheaper to send by mail on external hard drives than through any sort of network!

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Imagine sitting in that room with the "highest powered" people in the space telescope industry

Here's the Webb Telescope's backplane arriving at GSFC:

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> 2000mm focal length?!

One of my telescopes is 1800mm f/9 native focal length with an 8" front lens, talk about resolution and light gathering. It would be an honor to try it from a central park apartment in New York

That's not a camera, it's a telescope that can take pictures.

this will be great in telescopes and lenses

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I would say they exercised too much restraint in that case, i credit them for their restraint, but i wouldn't want things to get far enough to have one of them get shot. Smack the crap out of a fighter with a telescopic baton, by all means, or pepper spray, or tazer.

Interesting though that it was their own gun that ended up escalating the physical confrontation into a firearm confrontation. However with the wild west nostalgia for gun laws over there, i can't see how you could send them out unarmed.

man, that thumbnail looks like one of the pillars of creation (famous hubble telescope image) - http://www.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/1/2/j/2/f/5/image.related.StuffPortrait.238x286.12jmnm.png/1420610142560.jpg

Actually, since the development of adaptive optics, ground based telescopes aren't obsolete at all. Even without adaptive optics they have their uses, and some interesting science is done with them.

Getting telescope time on a space based telescope (or large ground based telescope for that matter) is quite hard, which limits the things astronomers can do with them.

That makes sense since space is a vacuum that they would test it in a vacuum. For some reason, I was thinking it was a land based telescope. I guess those are pretty much obsolete at this point.

Thanks!

It might help to start with what the Backplane Pathfinder actually is - it's a non-flight replica of the Webb telescope’s center backplane (that link has more info and pictures).

Chamber A allows simulating the cold environment the real telescope will face in space, and is the same vacuum chamber where Apollo spacecraft were tested.

Now, to answer your question: They are testing the test procedures for the real telescope! (source: NASA). I realise that doesn't exactly answer your question, but I haven't found details of the actual tests they plan to run... so as a distraction, here are some more images - http://jwst.nasa.gov/images_backplane.html

haha awesome street light fix for TO MUCH LIGHT when trying to use a telescope @ 1 min mark http://youtu.be/rXrcm7DgDbA