COVID-19 Forces Earth’s Largest Telescopes to Close

April 11th, 2020

Hmm.

Via: Astronomy:

An Astronomy magazine tally has found that more than 100 of Earth’s biggest research telescopes have closed in recent weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What started as a trickle of closures in February and early March has become an almost complete shutdown of observational astronomy. And the closures are unlikely to end soon.

Observatory directors say they could be offline for three to six months — or longer. In many cases, resuming operations will mean inventing new ways of working during a pandemic. And that might not be possible for some instruments that require teams of technicians to maintain and operate. As a result, new astronomical discoveries are expected to come to a crawl.

“If everybody in the world stops observing, then we have a gap in our data that you can’t recover,” says astronomer Steven Janowiecki of the McDonald Observatory in Texas. “This will be a period that we in the astronomy community have no data on what happened.”

Posted in [???], Space | Top Of Page

2 Responses to “COVID-19 Forces Earth’s Largest Telescopes to Close”

  1. cryingfreeman says:
    April 11, 2020 at 9:44 am

    Does that mean we won’t get to see any decent quality images of the asteroid allegedly approaching near the month’s end?

  2. Kevin says:
    April 11, 2020 at 10:11 am

    I was looking for more info on this telescope closure situation and… See Musk’s recent tweet at the top.

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