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Giant Telescopes Of The Future
mindpixel writes: "Mindjack just published my article about the the future of very large telescopes, such as the VLT and the OWL which I talked about in my /. interview. In addition, I talk about a future space-based telescope that would use the Sun's gravity to 'image large surface features,' of extrasolar planets, which telescpes like the VLT can just detect, 'such as oceans, continents or ice caps, or even the impact of civilization on such features.'"
One reason I understand for having Hubble in space is the fact that diffraction of light from the atmosphere and maybe even minute seismic vibrations from the earth would distort the picture for a large telescope. Does anyone know from close we are to the point where larger land telescopes will be made impractical be these phenomenon?
I stole this Sig
A very readable article, but I was surprised to see no other information on the referenced large telescopes. To save others from searching as I did, take a look at:
The solar foci telescope sounds like a really interesting idea but I'm not sure it's all that practical now or in the near future. 550 astronomical units is really far out there, several orders of magnitude further then any other space mission to date. Combine that with the proposed size of the mission spacecraft, again vastly larger then anything previously done, and I don't see this happening anytime soon. Still, a very interesting idea though and a logical extension of using extra-galatic objects and looking for lensed objects behind them. Just a few years back that was 'never been done before' stuff too so who knows. In any event, I have to give credit to whomever came up with this idea, they certainly think big!
More information on the solar foci idea can be found on this page from the Texas Space Grant Consortium.
space is that empty. In interplanetary space there are about two or three molecules per cup of vacume space.
anything without a gravitational field can be expected to last damn near forever if you keep it away from things with gravitational fields. Basically if we put it far away from the sun, comet tails, and other planets there's almost no chance it will ever be hit by anything.
It's only space near planets that is filled with junk. And earth is an especially bad case because we've dumped lots of additional junk in orbit ourselves.
tjw19[at]columbia.edu
If your interested in this have a look at quite a few other plans in the works, many not so far off (2004 and beyond) for new telescopes looking for extra-solar planets and such.
For example the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) which although is currently un-funded, is targeted to launch around 2011.
More links and info.
These kinds of advancements make me happy to be alive now, and I look forward to 'seeing' the first "earth like" plannet!
If you can get an array with a long enough baseline, and high precision in positioning, you can do interferometry with space telescopes. In principle that could give you enough resolution to spot small planets around nearby stars. JPL is currently studying a space interferometry mission, to fly by 2009, which will fly a small interferometer to demonstrate the potential of this technique.
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