{"id":463,"date":"2012-06-02T14:47:35","date_gmt":"2012-06-02T19:47:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/?p=463"},"modified":"2012-06-02T14:47:35","modified_gmt":"2012-06-02T19:47:35","slug":"telescope-lost-and-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2012\/06\/02\/telescope-lost-and-found\/","title":{"rendered":"Telescope lost and found"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of you probably already know about this, but for those who don’t, here’s a strange story<\/a>. A telescope designed to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation was on its way to the NASA balloon launch facility in Palestine, Texas, when it went missing for about \u00a0three days.<\/p>\n

The driver of the truck containing the telescope disappeared for a while, then turned up without the trailer containing the telescope. The trailer turned up later. The driver won’t say what happened.<\/p>\n

Apparently the telescope is fine. All that was missing from the trailer were “two bicycles and three ladders.”<\/p>\n

The cost to replace the telescope would have been enormous, but of course it’s an extremely illiquid asset — who would you try to fence it to?<\/p>\n

Since I work in this field, it’s no surprise that I know many of the people involved in the experiment, and of course I’m very relieved for them and for the cosmology community.<\/p>\n

I feel a strong connection to this story, because many years ago I was briefly a member of a team that flew a similar (albeit much more primitive) microwave background telescope from the balloon launch facility in Palestine. I wasn’t involved in the project for very long, and my only real contribution was driving the truck containing the telescope back from Palestine to California with my friend and fellow graduate student Warren Holmes. Nowadays, apparently they outsource tasks like that to professionals rather than grad students. Look how well that worked out.<\/p>\n

A couple of elitist coastal vignettes about Palestine:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. One guy on the experiment was a vegetarian. Options for him were not plentiful. He got mighty sick of the salad bar at the Golden Coral.<\/li>\n
  2. One of the more interesting places to visit in Palestine was the pawn shop. As I recall, about 80% of the shelf space was taken up by two items: guns and guitars.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Some of you probably already know about this, but for those who don’t, here’s a strange story. A telescope designed to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation was on its way to the NASA balloon launch facility in Palestine, Texas, when it went missing for about \u00a0three days. The driver of the truck containing the … Continue reading Telescope lost and found<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}