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Could we turn the sun into a gigantic telescope?
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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The satellites would still orbit the Sun, so you’d get a look at anything opposite the ecliptic at whatever its orbital period is. The parallax at those distances (seems like) is so great, even with long collection times you’d have probably years worth of exposure before a target moves out of the primary “lens”.
Right...so we would be unable to retask it to observe something else that did not align with the satellite's current orbital position. Seems like a pretty big limitation to me.
Well, we would choose a specific thing or group of things close together that we want to look at, and launch for that specific thing.
Once done with the primary mission, all the neat things we pick up on while getting the primary taken care of can be looked at.
That's what we already do with space things anyway. It just happens that most of the telescopes we've built to date were more general purpose. Hubble has/d a much broader scope than JWST, but you can't discount either for their value.
I'm probably not making my point very well, but basically we wouldn't just send it somewhere arbitrarily (which I'm sure you already know, but some might not think about that) and hope to find something cool, we will intentionally target something and then go from there.
We technically have the tech to do this, what we lack, is species cohesion and cooperation to lower the effective costs of said endeavor, and the patience to wait for it to set up. Being so far from the inner planets means it's gonna take a long time to get in position.
The chance for even the glimpse could reveal a whole lot. Then, on the second pass in 10,000 years…