Astronomers have found the very best place on Earth to observe the heavens. Now all they have to do is get there.

Ridge A, as the spot is known, is located in Antarctica, six hundred miles from the South Pole and 13,297 feet above sea level. All things considered, it's probably the very worst place on the surface of the planet for humans.

As far as anyone knows, no person has ever even set foot there. But thanks to satellite data, scientists now know that Ridge A surpasses all other sites based on eight factors that impact the sharpness of observations, like cloud cover and atmospheric turbulence.

"The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers," said Will Saunders, an astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and visiting professor to UNSW, in a press release. "Because the sky there is so much darker and drier, it means that a modestly-sized telescope there would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on earth."

The new work was published today in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The Antarctic site, said co-author Patrick Minnis, an atmospheric scientist at NASA Langley, was about as "close to space as you can get," and that's exactly what makes it so great. It's cold, dry, and nearly lacking weather or even clouds.

A similar site, Dome A — about 90 miles from Ridge A — became the home of the first robotic Antarctic viewing station, The PLATeau Observatory (PLATO). It was deployed in January of 2008 and collected data all last winter without humans attending to it. The Chinese-led, Australian-built project could be a model for future robotic observatories near the South Pole.

The simple observatory is, in the words of University of Arizona astronomer Craig Kulesa, a steel shipping container that scientists "cut in half and insulated the crap out of."

"It's kind of Rube Goldberged together but they did a really good job designing it," Kulesa said.

Each of the last two winters, it operated without a human within 600 miles for more than 200 days.

"It's been working without any human intervention and just taking some fantastic data," he said. "It's just an unbelievable success."

Getting experiments to the Antarctic plateau isn't easy. Ridge A is far from everywhere on Antarctica, which is, of course, one of the most isolated places on Earth. PLATO was shipped to a Chinese coastal base and then sledded up to Dome A. It took two weeks.

Even given the difficulty that humans have in the Antarctic environment, building telescopes in Antarctica could turn out to be a bargain.

"It's not convenient compared to going to the Palomar Observatory but if you put it in the context of a space mission, it's incredibly cheap," Kulesa said.

Getting a kilogram of anything into orbit costs thousands of dollars. The cost of getting a kilogram to Ridge A is about $10.

The problem is that unlike space telescope missions, an Antarctic observatory can't bank on NASA-level cash. The space agency isn't too interested in hearing that some its work could be accomplished on the ground. The National Science Foundation has a third of NASA's budget and the American efforts in Antarctica have focused on the base at the South Pole.

"We've put so much effort into the South Pole station that this is a bit of a distraction," Kulesa said.

The NSF was a minor partner in the PLATO experiments, though, and Kulesa is confident that as the virtues of Ridge A become clear, momentum will build in the scientific community.

"I think there will be more and more people realizing that the Plateau is significantly better than the South Pole for a lot of kinds of astronomy," he concluded.

Images: 1. Google Earth. 2. PLATO mission.

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