[X] My Assistant

[jamescanvin]

http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2006/pr-46-06.html

57 million euros for a detailed study, construction starting in 3 years.

42m primary , 6m secondary!



James

[remcook]

it works in the radio frequencies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Long_Bas..._Interferometry
http://www.jive.nl/~mag/hdf/evn/pr/

As I understand it, for VIS/IR the wavelength is obviously much shorter and therefore there are more stringent requirements on the timing of the phases. So you need actual beams interfering physically and even that is hard!

[dilo]

...and, one day, we will make arrays of thousands huge space telescopes interferometrically linked, floating inside the extremely dark and big shadow of Jupiter or Saturn!

[karolp]

I talked on the phone with a friend of mine today and we were wondering what imaging capabilities this monster might have regarding the Solar System. He told me that being 4 times larger than Keck it would have 16 times better resolution. I was wondering whether it could actually image any objects in the Oort Cloud. What magnitude could it go to? 30? 40?

[ngunn]

I talked on the phone with a friend of mine today and we were wondering what imaging capabilities this monster might have regarding the Solar System. He told me that being 4 times larger than Keck it would have 16 times better resolution. I was wondering whether it could actually image any objects in the Oort Cloud. What magnitude could it go to? 30? 40?

That would be 16 times the light gathering or about 3 magnitudes. Theoretical angular resolution, though, would only be 4 times better. In practice ground-based telescopes never reach their theoretical resolution anyhow, it's limited by the cleverness of the adaptive optics and I'm not sure how the difficulties of adaptive optics increase with size.