It’s hard not to love the Kepler Space Telescope. Launched in 2009, the venerable spacecraft discovered nearly 5,000 suspected or confirmed exoplanets—or worlds orbiting other stars—during its 11-year lifetime. It was built at a very affordable $600 million and launched by 9,606 scientists. So it’s all good. But not quite.
The 11-year-old telescope that discovered many other planets did not do us any favors. It produced a total of 4,784 tons of CO2 per year, or 52,620 tons over its lifetime. This was mostly due to the electricity and supercomputing it required to keep it running. This equates to 12 tons of carbon dioxide per paper and five tonnes per author.
Astronomy seems to be the most straightforward of sciences in many ways. It is free to gaze at the sky. But both ground-based and space-based observatories extract a huge environmental toll—in terms of construction, launch, energy generation and consumption, and even, at least before the pandemic, in the air miles burned as the world’s estimated 30,000 astronomers flew from conference to conference around the globe.
Now, you can get a Inclusion of new paper Astronomy of NatureThe skygazing discipline has been analyzed in its entirety to determine its greenhouse gas footprint. The study involved the analysis of the total CO2 output by 46 space-based missions, and 39 ground observatories. These data date back as far as the 62-year-old. Observatoire de Haute Provence, in the southeastern France and as recent as the new InSight observatoryNew Mexico’s online portal went online in 2017. In that time, the researchers—affiliated with the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP), in Toulouse, France—concluded that the 85 observatories have generated a prodigious 20.3 million tons of CO2, or an average of 1.2 million tons per year.
“Astronomers get caught up in the day to day—the next funding grant, the next new project,” said Annie Hughes, IRAP astronomer and a co-author of the paper, at a March 17 news conference announcing the results. “Our colleagues are aware of climate change as a problem, but there’s an enormous amount of inertia in the system.”
The paper, which had been in progress for three years by the researchers, used 2019 as the year of reference for data and does not include any new observatories such as the James Webb Space TelescopeThe massive, or? Square Kilometer ArrayAustralia and South Africa are currently under construction. The trio of spacecraft from China and the United Arab Emirates, which arrived at Mars 2021, are not included in this work. Even without these new entries, the numbers are troubling enough.
When it comes to ground-based observatories, the straightforward business of construction dominates the first phase of the CO2 emissions—with the pouring of concrete, which 600 kg (1.100 lbs.) of CO2 are released Releases 600 kg (1,100 lbs.). of CO2 For every ton of material used. The cement industry alone is responsible for 8% annual greenhouse gas emissions.
“The VLT [Very Large Telescope]ALMA and the ALMA [Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array] are just tremendously big and expensive infrastructure and they come with a huge carbon footprint,” said IRAP astronomer and paper co-author Jürgen Knödlseder at the press conference.
Location is important too. The electricity required to operate a ground-based telescope’s observations is its largest CO2 contributor. 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. This makes for spectacular viewing, but Chile ranks in the middle of countries when it concerns the cleanliness of its electricity grid.
“Chile has a kind of average emission factor for electricity,” said Knödlseder. “So it’s not as high, for example, as Australia, which burns a lot of coal, but it’s not as low as Sweden and France, which use a lot of renewable energy.”
Worse, extremely remote observatories may not even be connected to their home countries’ electrical grids and thus must run on their own diesel-generated electricity. ALMA, one of these observatories, produced nearly 300,000 tons CO2 during its construction phase. It continues to emit an average of 56.154 tons per year.
Because they are much smaller than terrestrial observatories, space-based observatories have a lower carbon footprint. Also, their construction is usually done in climate-controlled clean rooms and hangars. Their greatest impact on the climate is caused by the annual electricity consumption, which increases over time. The Hubble Space Telescope, still in operation and in service for almost 30 years according to the 2019 data used for the paper, has released approximately 21 tons of CO2 per 52,497 papers about its findings. The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021. It is expected to release more than 1.22million tons of CO2 during its 20-year lifespan, according to the authors.
The paper states that the astronomy industry must take drastic measures to reduce its carbon footprint. It should not be considered a cost of doing astronomy business. The 85 observatories emitted 20.3 million tons of carbon dioxide, which is roughly equivalent to the annual greenhouse gases emissions of entire countries such Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, and Estonia. There are ways to lower those numbers.
“The first step,” said IRAP astronomer and co-author Lyigi Tibaldo, “is that existing structures are decarbonized, by switching to renewable energy sources.” Sun is abundant in the Atacama, making solar power a viable option. The more the European energy grid rely on renewables the more telescopes there will be able work without having to have a significant greenhouse effect. While most space-based observatories rely on solar panels to keep them running, a cleaner grid allows for their observations and data analysis with a smaller carbon footprint.
The authors suggest that we slow down the current building boom at observatories in Atacama and other locations, and rely more on the existing astronomical infrastructure. “The strong reduction of emissions that are required in the next decade will not be achieved if we continue building new infrastructure at the pace that is occurring now,” said Tibaldo. “That will also give us more time to perform more comprehensive exploration of the data we have from existing infrastructure.”
This, the authors admit, won’t be a popular recommendation. “Some of our colleagues are a bit shocked at the idea of slowing down,” said Knödlseder. “But the [climate] emergency we are facing is so big that we think this option must indeed be on the table.”
For now, the telescopes will keep on working and the astronomers will keep on observing and the paper will continue to be churned out by the thousands and—academically at least—that is a very good thing. But as the authors noted in the very first paragraph of their paper, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres has warned that the most recent International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is nothing less than a “code red for humanity.” It is well and good to go searching for and studying new worlds. But it’s even more important that we preserve and protect the one we’ve got.
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Write to Jeffrey Kluger at [email protected].
