Back around 2000 there were huge controversies going on across Astronomy about the design of a new and much more powerful camera for the Hubble Space Telescope. As a member of the tiny team responsible for designing it I decided to look for objective ways of estimating the discovery potential of ANY astronomical instrument, past ,present or future, using Information Theory. Such had never been done before and the results were more than exciting, or so the many many readers of this paper told me me at the time. But it never got published, mainly because journal editors claimed they couldn’t find “anyone broad enough to referee it”. And I was frantically busy on other things, not least designing the new camera (WFC-3) which is still up there working beautifully in orbit, though it could have been more powerful still if Information Theory had had its way. Then when another editor asked for a copy to publish I found I’d bloody lost it. But thanks to a colleague Bob Fosbury inside ESA who found a copy stained with choclatey fingers, and missing the diagrams, the version below is available for anyone interested. Any astronomer trying to raise funds to build an ambitious new instrument, or to squish a project they don’t believe in, might find it useful.
PDF version of file
Tags: history
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