A science blog with Eric Berger

Sunday Q&A: Talking astronomy with Fritz Benedict




What will the primary focus be of your talk in Houston?

Extrasolar planets and the two telescopes I use to study them.



Fritz would rather be sailing.

Funding is flat to decreasing.














Categories: Astronomy
Eric Berger

3 Responses

  1. xxx says:

    Smartest comment I have heard here, “In the quest for ‘new’ knowledge ‘most of the time’ it makes sense to involve the ‘smartest’ people possible”

    Too much knowldge sometimes gives a one-side tunnel-vission solution. Sometimes you need ‘interested’, yet informed, people without a serious investment (professional), that ask the serious, and sometimes obvious, questions for the commoner.

    This is true for all professions

  2. Don says:

    We viewed the transit of Venus outside of St. Peter’s Square, Rome, in June of 2004. We met some young men from Dublin and who had brought their telescope as well. The transit is significant in that it’s measurement help determine the distance from the earth to the sun.

  3. John says:

    The reason that funding is flat to decreasing for the robotic programs is two-fold:

    1) The manned space flight effort gets the most headlines and so gets the most funding, even at the expense of more science-heavy robotic missions

    2) The Cold War is over. At a JPL conference about a decade ago, they showed a nice graph that illustrated the size of probes over the years by original launch date. Once the Cold War was over, we stopped trying to launch bigger probes than the USSR, and the first great era of interplanetary exploration came to a close.

    The Augustine Commission’s report may help correct the first problem (assuming that Congress listens to the mesage of “Give NASA more money!”). And China’s ambitious launch program may correct the second. If so, we may see the start of the second great era of space exploration.