.jeffreykluger: Astronomy's environmental toll is surprisingly high. But there are ways to clean it up
now under construction in Australia and South Africa. Other spacecraft not included in the work include the trio of ships from China, the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates which arrived at Mars in 2021. But even without those new entries to the field added, the numbers are troubling enough.
Location makes a difference too. Once a ground-based telescope is built, its biggest CO2 contribution comes from the electricity it takes to conduct its observations. Chile’s Atacama Desert is home not only to the VLT and the ALMA, but to 14 other observatories, thanks to its exceedingly dry air and its 330 nights of clear skies per year. That makes for great viewing, but Chile ranks only in the middle range of countries when it comes to the cleanliness of its electricity grid.
Space-based observatories have, on the whole, a smaller carbon footprint, since they are extremely small compared to terrestrial observatories and their construction generally takes place in climate-controlled clean-rooms and hangars. Their biggest climate impact comes from the electricity used in their annual operation, which adds up over time. The Hubble Space Telescope, which is still operating and had been in service for nearly 30 years as of the 2019 data used in the paper, has released 1.
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