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Hubble's mirror is 8 feet in diameter, and you aren't going to be assembling something as high precision as that in space, at least not from a few components.
by kbenson 7y ago
Hubble's mirror is 8 feet in diameter, and you aren't going to be assembling something as high precision as that in space, at least not from a few components. If we had the manufacturing capability to make it from scratch in space, maybe, but that's a much larger enterprise.
There is a question of whether 100 a foot diameter telescopes can work as well or better than one 8 foot one. Or 500. If it's about photons hitting the lens, do enough lenses in an area and post-processing make up for the fact that they aren't connected?
- ceejayoz 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope
- mstipetic 7y agoWell let's make the manufacturing capability to do so. It's as if the "manufacturing capability" is some limited rare earth metal. What is the actual limited resource other that ingenuity and engineering?
- ryan93 7y agoYou can’t manufacture complicated objects in space
- mstipetic 7y agoWe shouldn't have been able to land on the moon using whiteboard engineering and calculator level computers, but we did
- hgoel 7y agoThat won't magically make it feasible to manufacture such precise objects in space anytime soon.
- avmich 7y agoIn fact, in space we can make something which we can't do on Earth - weightlessness being the critical enabling factor. With capabilities to launch as cheap as Spaceship promises, we can develop space manufacturing rather soon.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoWhy shouldn't we have been able to land on the moon?
- avmich 7y agoBecause, as you've said, we can't manufacture complex objects in space.
- nine_k 7y agoThere are several large terrestrial telescopes that use assemblies of a number of coordinated smaller mirrors. This looks like something reasonably doable on Earth orbit with the current launch capabilities.