I wonder if you could use just 1 spacecraft and actually exploit the rotation of the planet to "scan" the planet surface in 1 dimension. The movement of your te

I wonder if you could use just 1 spacecraft and actually exploit the rotation of the planet to "scan" the planet surface in 1 dimension. The movement of your telescope would provide the other dimension, so in a slow fly-through you could get a 2D image of the planet surface. So e.g. imaging a 12000 km (Earth-size) planet at 10 km/pixel would take 1200 planet rotations, each providing a row of pixels, taking about 3 years assuming it's rotating at the speed of Earth. You would just have to know ahead of time the orientation of the planet's axis of rotation so you approach the "focal region" from the right angle.