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Overwhelmingly Large Telescope Closer to Reality
An anonymous reader submits: "The 100m OWL telescope proposed a few years ago by the European Southern Observatory group (ESO) may actually be built. Currently, the largest aperture for a telescope is the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at a 'very tiny' 16.4m by comparison. This monster is predicted to have a light gathering resolution of about 40 times the Hubble Space Telescope and a sensitivity several thousand times greater. Among many other things, it should be powerful enough to detect and gather spectroscopic data of extra-solar planets in order to determine the atmospheric composition and any signatures for life, like oxygen." We mentioned the OWL in this previous article too.
How can a scientific article use such a fool multiplier as billion ? ...)
(english vs US vs old vs new vs
Please use comprehensible multipliers.
If in doubt, use popwer of ten!
I wonder what the exposure time of such a 'space photo' is... probably something in the order of minutes ?
In that case, how do they handle stuff like an overflying plane ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The mirror, much like the US 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii, would be made of 1,500 hexagonal segments and would use some of the clever computer techniques - active and adaptive optics - that further improve resolution.
Even with atmospheric disturbances that have to be compensated, I'd think getting the same sensitivity from an orbiting scope would be more expensive than buiding it down here.
I'd split the question:
1) what can the Hubble do that a 100m scope down here can't?
2) what can a 100m scope do that the Hubble can't up there?
The answers will probably point out that each has its pros and cons.
Ludicrously Large telescope?
I think finding wording that fits the name of a nightbird with extremely sensitive eyes had more to do with the choice of "Overwhelming" than anything else.
This has been a tendency for years: first invent an acronym, then find words that fit it.
My crazy thought was something akin to satellites with "butterfly nets". Even at 200m/sec, that's still a completely acheivable speed - you just have to apply energy to the problem. You have a satellite cruise out there and capture debris, coming up from behind it so as not to be damaged by high-speed impact; then drop it into the atmosphere over the ocean, where most (if not all) of it will burn up.
The satellite could use a fairly simple capture process, and could be refueled and prepared for it's next round by shuttle or at ISS.
But maybe I'm oversimplifying.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
The misconception here is that space is cubic, and even the region in earth orbit where most satellites are places has a volume exceeding that of the earth. It is HUGE. This makes the odds of collision, given that we have "only" placed a few thousand objects up there, ever, very remote. Granted, airliners occasionally crash into each other, too, and people do win the lottery...
A nearby star system in proximity of Alpha Centauri
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
You can integrate the images from lots of smaller mirrors pretty easily in software
/. post), I don't know that anyone has actually used either Keck or the VLT in multi-telescope mode for "real science". It turns out that optical interferometry is much harder than radio interferometry (see the VLA) and no one has successfully done it in any sort of regular way yet (I believe that they've done it once on Keck and once using two of the VLA telescopes, but never using all four).
Actually, that's hideously hard. Despite the suggestion made (by both the people running the VLT along with the
In short, people are discovering that doing optical interferometry is REALLY hard and building one, large telescope saves a lot of headaches (but, of course, is a lot more expensive).
Finally, having a telescope in space really does help out a lot for getting better resolution, but there is something to be said for large telescopes on the ground. They are able to gather more light and, hence, able to get a higher signal-to-noise ratio than a smaller, space-based telescope.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.