Pursuing ground breaking science in a highly cost and funding constrained environment presents new challenges to the development of future large space astrophysics missions. Within the conventional cost models for large observatories, executing a flagship “mission after next” appears to be unstainable. To achieve our nation’s space astrophysics ambitions requires new paradigms in system design, development and manufacture. Implementation of this new paradigm requires that the space astrophysics community adopt new answers to a new set of questions. This paper will discuss the origins of these new questions and the steps to their answers.
KEYWORDS: Space telescopes, Telescopes, James Webb Space Telescope, Astrophysics, Manufacturing, Systems modeling, Mirrors, Observatories, Optical instrument design, Diffraction
Pursuing ground breaking science in a highly cost-constrained environment presents new challenges to
the development of future space astrophysics missions. Within the conventional cost models for large
observatories, executing a flagship “mission after next” appears to be unsustainable. To achieve our
nation’s science ambitions requires not a paradigm shift but a completely new paradigm of system
design, development and manufacture. This paper explores the nature of the current paradigm and
proposes a series of steps to guide the entire community to a sustainable future.
KEYWORDS: Astrophysics, Space telescopes, James Webb Space Telescope, Manufacturing, Telescopes, Standards development, Mirrors, Optical instrument design, Observatories, Design for manufacturability
Pursuing ground breaking science in a highly cost-constrained environment presents new challenges to the development of future space astrophysics missions. Within the conventional cost models for large observatories, executing a flagship “mission after next” appears to be unstainable. To achieve our nation’s science ambitions requires a new paradigm of system design, development and manufacture. This paper explores the nature of the current paradigm and proposes a series of steps to guide the entire community to a sustainable future.
The challenges facing the developers of user interfaces for astronomy applications has never been greater. Astronomers
and engineers often use well-designed commercial and web applications outside their work environment and have come
to expect a similar user experience with applications developed for their work tasks. The connectivity provided by the
Internet and the ability to work from anywhere can improve user productivity, but it is a challenge to provide the kind of
interactivity and responsiveness needed for astronomical applications to web based projects. It is fair to say that browserbased
applications have not been adequate for many kinds of workhorse astronomy applications. The Flex/Actionscript
framework from Adobe has been used successfully at the Space Telescope Science Institute in a variety of situations that
were not possible with other technologies. In this paper, the Flex framework and technology is briefly introduced
followed by a discussion of its advantages and disadvantages and how it addresses user expectations. Three astronomy
applications will be presented demonstrating the technology capabilities with useful performance data. Flex/Actionscript
is not well known within the astronomy development community, and our goal is to demonstrate that it can be the right
choice for many astronomy applications.
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