Starship Based Space Telescope

[Exoscientist]

On 7/12/2021 at 3:13 AM, Shpaget said:

As we all know, resolution of a telescope is directly proportional to the size of its primary mirror. In case of Hubble, that is 2,4 m. So to achieve 10x resolution, a telescope would need to have a mirror of 24 m in diameter. Starship has a diameter of 9 m, so a mirror that fits inside would need to be foldable. James Webb Telescope has done it (or at least will have done it, hopefully), point is, it has precedent.

 

 The most important parameter for an optical telescope is light gathering power to see dimmer objects. In that case what we should be aiming for is 10x better area for the mirror. In this case it only has to be about 3 times larger diameter, about 7.6 m wide. Then it could fit in the Starship diameter. Actually this is pretty good because the largest single mirror we can do now is about 8 meters.

  Robert Clark

Edited July 27, 2021 by Exoscientist

[tater]

5 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

 The most important parameter for an optical telescope is light gathering power to see dimmer objects. In that case what we should be aiming for is 10x better area for the mirror. In this case it only has to be about 3 times larger diameter, about 7.6 m wide. Then it could fit in the Starship diameter. Actually this is pretty good because the largest single mirror we can do now is about 8 meters.

Light gathering and resolution are both important. For terrestrial telescopes, seeing is atmospherically limited, so light gathering ends up dominating.

For a space-based telescope that doesn't have to look through all that air, both matter.

But an 8m telescope in space will be diffraction limited as to resolution, vs being limited by seeing, so still better than the terrestrial counterpart.