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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.
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 ?
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
A nearby star system in proximity of Alpha Centauri
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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.