Quote:
Originally Posted by MattyC
Thanks Nyah. So it still seems to me that we could have built and launched a telescope built to see the solar system in high-res for less cost and time than it took to send these probes all over the place, unless there's another reason to get that close other than pictures. Can't we see what the planet is made of (element wise) from here?
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Another way to look at it...
At closest approach New Horizons will be able to see down to 100m resolution. Pluto is 2300km in diameter so we could get an image 23,000 pixels across, ignoring the curve of Pluto.
Pictures of Pluto with Hubble are like a few pixels wide to maybe 15 with the older camera, so lets just call it 20 pixels.
To see Pluto with a telescope at the same resolution New Horizons will see Pluto we'd need one with over 1000x the resolving power.
Imagine building a telescope with a mirror hundreds of metres or even kilometres across! James Webb will costs what, $10 billion or more when it's done, and that's just for a telescope with a 6.5m diameter mirror.
New Horizons cost less than $1 billion.
Planets and stars are really really small compared to galaxies and stuff.