Space startup Xplore Solar Sail spacecraft design would go seven times faster than the Voyager spacecraft to enable vastly improved exploration of the solar system. The initial design would be to get to 5AU/year speeds but we need to improve it to 40 AU/year speeds. The goal would be to reach 550-650 AU where the …
Hypertelescope capable of direct high-resolution imaging with a high limiting magnitude have been built and tested on Earth. The Hypertelescope group have proposed giant telescopes 10-25 kilometers across in lunar impact craters. Many small mirrors can be dilutely arrayed in a lunar impact crater spanning 10 to 25km. The light from two Keck telescopes were …
Avi Loeb discusses his expectation that unmanned alien space probes would vastly outnumber manned alien spaceships. This is certainly the case for the human space program where we have sent out about one hundred manned missions but have sent tens of thousands of unmanned missions over seventy years. In an interview, Avi explained that it …
The James Webb Telescope found earlier giant galaxies or giant blackholes from only 500 million years after the big bang. Michio Kaku believes they could be giant early blackholes that were left over from the big bang. Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per …
A new NASA NIAC phase 1 study is analyzing a 20-meter class infrared space telescope. It is currently impossible to find Earth-like planets in the habitable zones (where the temperature supports liquid water) of Sun-like stars. It is even harder to measure the composition of their atmospheres. But this is necessary if we want to …
The current Transastra Sutter ground telescope test model, comprising four telescopes, moved in early April to the Winer Observatory, where over two months it tracked multiple small, dark, fast-moving objects by collecting about 50 extended images every night built from over 6,000 exposures taken over an eight-hour period. They will launch a cubesat in 2023 …
Researchers from Australia and Singapore are working on a new quantum technique that could enhance optical VLBI. It’s known as Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP), which allows quantum information to be transferred without losses. When imprinted into a quantum error correction code, this technique could allow for VLBI observations into previously inaccessible wavelengths. Once integrated …
Hybrid observatories will combine a 100 meter diameter starshade in space with a telescope on the ground. The Hybrid Observatory for Earth-like Exoplanets (HOEE) would convert the largest ground-based telescopes now under construction (Giant Magellan Telescope, Thirty Meter Telescope, and Extremely Large Telescope) into the most powerful planet finders yet designed. No other proposed equipment …
A meter-class telescope with a coronagraph to block solar light, placed in the strong interference region of the solar gravitational lens (SGL), is capable of imaging an exoplanet at a distance of up to 30 parsecs with a few 10 km-scale resolution on its surface. The picture shows results of a simulation of the effects …
If we send telescopes out to 4 light days we can use the gravity of the sun to amplify the power of telescopes by 100 billion times. Although we can build larger telescopes with higher resolution than exists today near to Earth, the telescopes that are sent out to gravitational lensing regions would resolve much …
The solar gravitational lens (SGL) is characterized by remarkable properties: it offers brightness amplification of up to a factor of ~1e11 [100 billion amplification] (at 1 um) and extreme angular resolution (~1e-10 arcsec). As such, it allows for extraordinary observational capabilities for direct high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy of Earth-like exoplanets. Above – Artist’s depiction of …