In article ,
Henry Spencer wrote:
In article .com,
wrote:
How about this: putting 3 or 4 Hubble-sized (for redundancy & time-use
issues) craft in Jovian Trojan orbits would give you a 10 1/2
AU-equivalent instrument! That would almost see planets in Andromeda!

Only if you could hold the distance between them stable to within a
fraction of a wavelength of light, *and* beam the light gathered by one
to another across that distance without losing much of it. That...
presents problems, to put it mildly.

In principle, there's another option, analogous to the way radio
astronomers do inteferometry with telescopes thousands of miles
apart; it only requires that you be able to record phase information
as well as brightness information.

But while this means recording data at a few gigahertz for 20cm radio
work, this would mean doing so at about 10^14 Hz, which also...
presents problems, to put it mildly. But this particular problem
may be more solvable in the long run.

cheers,

Steven

--


"M-Theory is the unifying pachyderm of the five string theories."
- Brian Greene, _The Elegant Universe_