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Astronomers Dream Big, Consider Four Future Space Telescopes
- Jiro 5y agoThis HN post is useless. The article here is about the Decadal Survey which is about to come out as of the date of the article. It came out literally a day later: https://www.aip.org/fyi/2021/astro2020-decadal-survey-arrives-priorities-major-facilities https://www.aip.org/fyi/2021/astro2020-decadal-survey-arrive...
- ncmncm 5y agoThe most important upcoming telescope is the Starlink satellite array. It will be computationally expensive to integrate signals from such fast-moving receivers, but the resolution and noise resistance of the very large number of receivers positioned on a baseline fully 13,000 km across will enable incomprehensibly better imaging that has ever been conceived of. For optical telescopy, position a collection of mirrors, in solar orbit, multiple km apart, with ion drive station keeping. You don't need many, and they needn't be very big. But the long baseline will let you image continents of exoplanets.