Modular Space Telescope tagged posts

Illustration shows how a robot could assemble the trusses that would support a massive telescope mirror. Credit: Sergio Pellegrino/Caltech

Seeing deep into space requires large telescopes. The larger the telescope, the more light it collects, and the sharper the image it provides. Eg, NASA’s Kepler space observatory, with a mirror diameter of <1 meter, is searching for exoplanets orbiting stars up to 3,000 light-years away. By contrast, the Hubble Space Telescope, with a 2.4-meter mirror, has studied stars more than 10 billion light-years away.

Now Caltech’s Sergio Pellegrino and colleagues are proposing a space observatory that would have a primary mirror with a diameter of 100 meters – 40 times larger than Hubble’s...