Question
Help, I recently received a request from a friend for information about early (the earlier the better) SF stories about (or containing) space telescopes. arrgh. I vaguely remember a short story about a martian who’s telescope used mirrors that were rotating pools of mercury. The rotation allegedly formed the mercury into the proper shape.
Anwser
There’s been at least one real telescope (in Canada) made with a mercury mirror. (And rotation does create a parabolic shape, which is one common mirror shape; the Mirror Lab here which makes large mirrors spins the molten glass to get the general shape). I see by a google that the mercury mirrors have cheated a bit, and used a parabolic dish to hold the mercury to reduce the amount of Hg needed. The problem, of course, is that you can only look straight up. It is described at http://www.astro.ubc.ca/lmt/lm/ and apparently they’re working on another larger one that should see first light Real Soon Now.
Associated Telescopes In Space Question: How many stars are there?

• Anwser: There are about 6000 stars a person can see in the sky without using a telescope. Using telescopes, astronomers have charted more than 100,000 stars. Astronomers discovered that we live inside a large galaxy of stars called the Milky Way. Almost all the stars ever photographed are in this galaxy. A galaxy is like a big city of stars. There may be about one hundred billion stars in our galaxy (100,000,000,000). To imagine this number, think of a heavy snow storm that covered the city of Ames, Iowa. Every snowflake represents a star. We would live on a little planet in orbit about one of the snow flakes. Astronomers have also discovered many other galaxies. There may be more than 100 billion other galaxies in the universe that we could see with our telescopes. And there may be much more of the universe than we can see.

Associated Telescopes In Space Question: How many space shuttles have gone up?

• Anwser:These space shuttles have flown in space: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour. Challenger was destroyed in an accident on Jan 28, 1986 when it was attempting it’s tenth mission into space. (The first shuttle test vehicle was Enterprise which was used for landing tests. It was not designed to go in space. ) Using the five orbiters, there have been 68 shuttle missions so far.

Associated Telescopes In Space Question: How many parts are there in a space shuttle?

• Anwser:The big parts are: space shuttle orbiter – that glides back like an airplane external tank – carries hydrogen and oxygen for the main engines 2 solid rocket boosters – rockets on the side of the external tank I don’t know how many small parts there in the space shuttle. The vehicle is very complex. A list of names for some of the major components takes 300 pages. I would guess there were 10 million small parts, but I don’t really know. I hope you stay interested in space exploration.
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