Wikipedia:Peer review/COBE/archive1

COBE
I think this article is a great example of a spacecraft article and I'd like to get it upto standards of a FA. It is also become mor relevant with the award of the nobel prize in physics to 2 of its principle investigators. I look forward to hearing any suggestions. - Ryjaz 15:15, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * In general, I thought that the historical information and the general information on the spacecraft was OK. However, the article's scientific information needs significant improvement, and the article lacks a crucial discussion of the instrumentation.  Comments that I had as I read through this article:
 * No discussion is provided to explain the motivation for the COBE research in the first place. Some background information (on the detection of the CMBR, the effort to characterize its spectrum, and the search for anisotropies) is needed.
 * No discussion is provided about the instrumentation (DIRBE, FIRAS, and DMR). This is crucial to any description of a space telescope, especially COBE.  These things are the most important part of the spacecraft, since they make the actual scientific measurements.  This should be a large section of the article.
 * The "right ascension of ascending node" is in units of degrees. Is this standard for spacecraft?  Most astronomers write right ascension in hours, minutes, and seconds.  Later references to the ascending node are also confusing.  What is an ascending node of 6 p.m.?
 * I do not think that the role of DIRBE was protrayed accurately. Was DIRBE designed for detecting infrared emission from galaxies?  I know it did this, but I seem to recall that the results were more useful for mapping and studying dust emission within the Milky Way.  (By the way, Sodroski et al. 1995 is about the Milky Way.)  This should be researched further.
 * The article makes repeated references to "early galaxies". What is this supposed to mean?  This is not a term used in extragalactic astronomy.  (Maybe someone meant to say "early-type galaxies", which can refer to elliptical and S0 galaxies.  However, this would not make sense; these galaxies are dust poor, and COBE would struggle as much as IRAS to detect such galaxies.)
 * I placed the blackbody section ahead of the anisotropy section. I believe the blackbody nature of the CMBR was discovered and published first, but I could be wrong.  Logically, it makes more sense to talk about the general nature of the specrtum before describing the anisotropies.
 * The "Intrinsic anisotropy of CMB" is poorly written. Moreover, it fails to communicate the scientific significance of the results (unlike the blackbody section).  This should be greatly expanded.
 * The "Early galaxies" section (which is misnamed) needs references. I would fix some of this information, but I don't even know where it came from (and I still don't know what it's talking about).
 * The references to scientific articles need to give the journal names. The Sodroski et al. reference is missing this.  It may also be nicer to link references to the ADS abstract server.
 * "Extragalactic background light" is not a common astronomy term. The reference in the Wikipedia article uses "cosmic infrared background", which is a common term.  I suggest using that instead.
 * An "Epilogue" section describing WMAP and Planck (in terms of CMBR science) and ISO, Spitzer, and Herschel (in terms of infrared astronomy) would be useful.
 * George J. Bendo 22:03, 11 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your insightful comments. I agree with you on the instruments and I'll try to update that section.  I've debated how in depth to get into the science findings.  Looking at something like the Hubble Telescope science section, this puts forth an argument for a brief talk only about the scientific findings.  As for the right ascension, I come from an orbital mechanics background and that is what we use. Ryjaz 15:32, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Different approaches should be taken for describing the scientific results of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and COBE. COBE was specialized and therefore produced mainly a few key observations of the CMBR and galactic/extragalactic dust emission.  Hence, it is possible to discuss the results from COBE (especially the measurements of the CMBR spectrum and anisotropies) in detail.  HST is a general purpose telescope that has been used in many different applications.  It is impossible to sumamrize all results from Hubble in a single article; only a few specific results may be highlighted.  George J. Bendo 03:07, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, Ruhrfisch 20:36, 17 October 2006 (UTC)