Quote:
Originally Posted by MattyC
Would putting telescopes in the orbits of different planets make a difference? Or is the distance between say here and Mars or Jupiter so negligable that it would be a wasted effort?
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The bigger the baseline the bigger the effective "mirror", but the weaker it is too (since the amount of light gathered only goes up by increasing the # of scopes, not by the distance between them).
I'm unsure of the details of what amount of light gathering would be effective with respect to the baseline.
As for in orbit of other planets, if we could make the scopes big enough (or have enough of them), then having them around Mars or Jupiter would be even better, but it requires super high levels of stability, something I don't even know if we'd be capable of at this point. I don't think they'd be able to orbit planets at all, they'd have to be at Lagrange points or something.
There's a cool video on the wiki page for Interferometry (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometry), but it also mentions that for just a 100m baseline they needed 0.5 µm stability, I can't imagine what would be needed for a baseline of hundreds of billions of m. If the two scopes can't move with relation to each other smaller than the width of a proton.. lol I guess there'd be a practical limit to the size
