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."

Comments

Wow.

[francisew]

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.

Why binocular?

[DrKyle]

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?

Re:Why binocular?

[Mark of THE CITY]

If you really wanted near-simultaneous binocular imaging to capture some 'fast' event, maybe you would want two cameras in solar orbit. At Earth's orbital radius (9 light minutes), for example, that would give you about 18 light minutes of separation.

I doubt there's a burning need for this, though.

Speaking of that exposure cycle...

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

Why not build a network of telescopes on the lunar surface? 14 days without solar exposure, a stable platform, no atmosphere... seems perfect.