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[-] BlushedPotatoPlayers@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 years ago

Just to add, radio telescopes easily have diameters of several 10 to several 100 meters, you won't put that easily in space. And even if you do, maybe one, not tens of them. And these are often used in network as well for interferometry to have higher spatial resolution, so that would be gone as well.

[-] booly@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago

Why can't we use the satellites for interferometry, too?

[-] BlushedPotatoPlayers@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 years ago

We could, but it's way more expensive. There was a ~10m dish added to space VLBI, but the ground stations are several times larger, up to a few 100m. And you need dish size for sensitivity: in interferometry the largest distance between two telescopes gives the size of the synthetic instrument, but the size of the individual dishes fills up the detector.

Also, if something breaks it's almost impossible to fix in space.

[-] SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

A couple of satellites can make a larger telescope than we could ever build on earth, and you avoid the natural interference as well as the the interference from other satellites (star link isn’t the only source of interference…).

[-] BlushedPotatoPlayers@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 years ago

Yes, and we are already doing that, VLBI uses dozens of telescopes, each of them larger that we could sensibly launch to space

[-] SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The vlbi has dozens of 20m dishes, they have satellites with 10m diameters and Orion is thought to have 100m diameter. We’ve launched larger into space already, and the VLBI has used space telescopes to increase its size already as well.

So to claim we can’t sensibly launch any, when we have them up there already is plain wrong.

[-] BlushedPotatoPlayers@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 years ago

Yes, I just wrote about that above. It's just the difference in cost between the two. How many large space observatories were there altogether? In the order of dozens maybe?

this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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