2009: An Astronomer's Delight

Artist's Conception of ALMA Array in Chile.  Credit:  ESO

As I told you last week, 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy.  The International Astronomical Union and UNESCO proclaimed it so in honor of the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope.

And appropriately so.  As laid out in this McClatchy Newspapers article, astronomers are looking forward to numerous major new optical and radio telescopes coming on line in 2009:

-- A major upgrade of the 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, including two advanced detectors that will vastly improve its vision for another five years.

-- A bigger European rival to Hubble called the Herschel Space Observatory.

-- ALMA, an array of 50-plus telescopes on a lofty desert in Chile that will be the most powerful ground-based observation system to date.

-- Kepler, an orbiting telescope designed specifically to look for inhabitable planets around distant stars.

-- Pan-STARRS, a set of four inter-connected telescopes to detect fast-moving hazardous objects, such as satellites or space rocks.

-- IceCube, an upside-down space particle observatory buried under the ice at the South Pole.

-- The Allen Telescope Array, a set of 42 of radio telescopes listening for extra-terrestrial messages from possible civilizations around another stars.

Get the full scoop here.