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Binocular Space Telescope in the Works
museumpeace writes "ABCNews.com's technology pages have a story about NASA's plans to orbit a binocular telescope. Similar in concept to the Arizona telescope reported in /., this new variable baseline interferometer would be able to operate in the UV which is unavailable to terrestrial intstruments. The telescope would have the resolving power of a 120 foot diameter conventional telescope."
What if they use it to look at earth ?
That's not a dupe, in fact that story was mentioned in this one.
No it's not a dupe. That story was about the University of Arizona's built telescope here on earth, this story is about a NASA telescope being designed destined for space. The only similarity is they are binocular type telescopes.
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The posts asking for what NASA is doing & wether this technique will reach space anytime soon are answered. Hubble 2.0 is very welcome ;)
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This is pretty neat. Low IR interference would be great. There is so much heating/cooling from exposure/shadow cycling as satellites orbit the earth that I'd guess it have cyclic noise.
They never really mentioned how high it would orbit.
120 feet of rail is a lot. I wonder how prone it'll be to damage?
The other telescope mentioned in the article seemed more interesting. Even though it's 1/4 the length, it had interferometers on board, and would probably be more useful for spectroscopic purposes.
I can understand that getting a nice pair of binoculars gives you a sense of depth perception, but when you are looking at something 50 light years away does it really make a difference that you take measurements from 120 feet apart? I mean they could just time lapse the images and then compare them as the Earth is moving way faster, as we are moving around the sun at about 1800 kilometers per second. So really, what good is 120 feet?
Why not build a network of telescopes on the lunar surface? 14 days without solar exposure, a stable platform, no atmosphere... seems perfect.
from looking at the sunshades, I'd guess that they plan to put Spirit in an L2 or earth trailing orbit, most likely L2-- it's close enough for high bandwidth communication, and it actually takes slightly less energy to get there than earth trailing.
The other mission they mentioned, SIM, won't do spectroscopy. It's a very high precision interferometer for astrometry-- it will measure positions of stars to a microarcsecond or so. I can't remember the down to earth comparison information, but it will be capable of detecting planets of a few earth masses in their stars' habitable zones around the nearest 250 or so stars. It will also remove the sin(i) ambiguity of the radial velocity measurements of the planets already known. There are also a bunch of other science programs covering stellar astrophysics, and some extragalactic stuff, too.
The problem is that the light from the two mirrors has to be cophased to within 1/10 of a single wavelength of UV light. Those tolerances are absolute bastards to achieve, even in outer space.
Spirit is intended to be in the IR, which makes the pathlength control a bit easier, and without knowing details of Spirit, I'd guess that the pathlength control requirements are a lot easier than they are on SIM, which is doing precision astrometry in the visible.
Why are there still foot circuling in the scientific community. Has the crash of the Mars Climate Orbiter learned us nothing?
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This a great way to ruin Earth's reputation, as a peeping tom. "I swear we weren't looking into your showers, aliens!"
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-relatively cheap CCD's mean that even amateurs can make great discoveries
-currently have orbiting telescopes covering a good chunk of the spectrum
-best is yet to come:
Kepler, SIM, James Webb Space Telescope, Terrestial Planet Finder, proposed earth based 100 meter optical telescopes, not to mention far off items like the Terrestial Planet Imager and this telescope!