According to a controversial study, astronomers are required to work to reduce these emissions from the facilities they use in their research, as a contribution to staving off climate danger, according to Agence France-Presse. It is reported that stargazing processes emit significant amounts of carbon dioxide.
This is the first time that researchers have sought to calculate the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the work tools of 30,000 astronomers, including ground radio telescopes, space probes and roaming robots sent into space. Preliminary results of the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, indicate that the total activity of these tools since their inception has produced at least 20.3 million tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the carbon balance recorded annually in Estonia or Croatia. The quantity produced by one astronomer is 1.2 million tons annually. The study confirms that this amount is almost “5 times higher” than that emitted by astronomers’ flights that they make for reasons related to their work.
“The astronomers community is currently discussing reducing carbon emissions associated with transportation and the activity of supercomputers,” Jürgen Knodelsider, director of the French National Center for Scientific Research, and lead author of the study, told AFP. Behind the problem is represented by the tools” they use in their work.
To assess the extent of this cause, the researcher conducted audits on 50 space missions and 40 observing facilities located on Earth, including the Hubble telescope, the Planck Space Observatory, the Insight exploration missions (Mars), the Rosetta probe (comet “Churi”), and the very large VLT telescope at Chile…
The ideal way to approach tools is to take into account the materials used to build them, their operating costs, and the amount of electricity they use. But this data was often not available, and the reason for this is sometimes due to the lack of transparency on the part of space agencies, explains Knodelsider, who works at the Research Institute specialized in astrophysics and planetary sciences in Toulouse, France.
To fill in these gaps, his team used an approach called “financial ratios” developed by the Agency for Environmental Transformation (Ademe) and the Association for Carbon Credit (ABC), which is based on the idea that the amounts of carbon released by a given activity are proportional to its cost and volume.