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0 pointsaurailious6y ago0 comments

Constructing a telescope on Mars would be a valuable investment when a permanent presence is based there.

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Mars is smaller than Earth, so planet-wide radio interferometry would be a smaller "aperture" than possible on Earth. If you're talking about extending the telescope to include both Earth and Mars, I imagine that doing the interferometry over changing speeds and distances would be challenging to say the least.

aurailiousOP6y ago

The speeds and distances of the planets are well known at this point and easily predicted. By the time of establishing a permanent presence on Mars the requirements of communications would already put in place the information needed if the DSN isn't already capable of it now. The compute needed would be greater, but so would the availability of it in the future too.

TeMPOraL6y ago

I hope one day we'll construct a telescope that uses the Sun for gravitational lensing. I've seen this paper once that claimed you could use it to image surface of exoplanets directly with pretty high (for our current astronomy standards) resolution. I think it talked about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft).

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bashinator6y ago

aurailiousOP6y ago

TeMPOraL6y ago

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