Idea for finding exoplanets.

[daniel l.]

I was thinking about the idea of deploying a fleet of telescope equipped cubesats into orbit to scan random stars for anything interesting so the major telescopes dont have to. This would reduce the time required to find planets because only the promising systems would even be looked at by spacecraft like hubble, or kepler.

[Nibb31]

What kind of optics do you think you can put on a cubesat? What sort of detail do you think you could resolve with those optics?

[daniel l.]

What kind of optics do you think you can put on a cubesat? What sort of detail do you think you could resolve with those optics?

no more than an average hobbyists telescope but i've heard it is enough to at least find systems with promise.

[NuclearNut]

no more than an average hobbyists telescope but i've heard it is enough to at least find systems with promise.

Source please.

Also, finding "systems with promise" could mean many things to as little as finding "yep, that star is the right size" and nothing more.

[daniel l.]

Source please.

Also, finding "systems with promise" could mean many things to as little as finding "yep, that star is the right size" and nothing more.

http://astronomyonline.org/Exoplanets/AmateurDetection.asp here ya go!

[MinimumSky5]

The only way a nanosatellite could conceivably find an exoplanet would be through the transit method, but to find an earthlike planet that would require keeping the satellite still for over a year to get enough readings.

Also, I have a hobbyists telescope which if I connected it to a CCD, it might just find something. The thing is, being a 14in diameter Cassegrain-Schmidt design, it could fit a Cubesat inside itself! You'd probably need something closer to 100Kg in weight at least to run that on orbit.

[Streetwind]

Those optics are far better than anything you can put on a cubesat. I don't think you realize just how small those are. Being in space is an advantage, but it doesn't compensate that much of a difference.

Another dealbreaker: cubesats have no attitude control. Not just "very little", but quite literally none at all. No reactions wheels, no RCS, nada. They don't even have engines. They're just a box of electronics you decouple, which sends signals until its orbit decays a few weeks later. And space telescopes, they need attitude control. They need the most precise and elaborate attitude control you can imagine.

You could do something like that, potentially, with a spacecraft like the Arkyd-100 as imagined by Planetary Resources. the Arkyd-100 is a probe of a size that a person can hold in their arms, and it carries a telescope of roughly the size of the ground-based amateur telescopes you linked. It is intended to look for near-Earth asteroids. The probe is designed to be cheap and mass-producable, and is equipped with attitude control and the ability to stay in space for an extended time.

I'm kind of scratching my head at your whole premise, though. "So the big telescopes don't have to". Which big telescopes? Hubble isn't hunting Exoplanets. Gaia isn't hunting exoplanets. Spitzer isn't hunting exoplanets. James Webb will not be hunting exoplanets either. They may be drafted to help with confirming strong candidates, but that will still be required even if the initial detection is done by another craft. Yes, Kepler is hunting exoplanets. Do you know why? Because it was designed from the ground up and launched for the express purpose of hunting exoplanets. That's literally all it does, and all it can do. It makes no sense trying to free up time for Kepler to do other things, because Kepler cannot do other things. Kepler can also detect things that no amateur telescope sized optics could hope to resolve, so it continues to be valuable in any case.

So while a flock of small planet hunter telescopes could indeed increase the number of stars we can survey at the same time, it would do nothing for "freeing up" existing telescopes.