could you imagine something as big as Arecibo was or FAST is floating in space? That'd be impressive. Would a constellation set up more like VLA be possible? Keep increasing the size of it with Starlink like launches??

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NitpickLawyer an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There's a proposal for a large constellation of small, cheap-to-build radio sats. Heard about it on a Fraser Cain podcast. They plan to send them to one of the Lagrange points and spread them out in x KM cube pattern. They also want some of the sats to do some RF processing on-site, and beam just the "results" back.

	▲	toxic72 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		These aren't telescopes, but it is quite similar to what you're describing otherwise: https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...

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adastra22 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

What's the point? The frequencies being listened to on these radio telescopes aren't affected by the atmosphere. Arecibo in space doesn't get you anything that Arecibo on the ground didn't (except hurricane resistance, I guess).

One exception is the far side of the moon to get away from radio noise. But other than that, there's no reason to put a radio telescope in space.

	▲	defrost 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm a fan of ground based radio astronomy, however: > there's no reason to put a radio telescope in space sadly isn't as true as it once was .. * https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/09/aa51856-... Once that constellation is fully expanded as intended, the planned chinese constellation joins it, and other nations (India?, the EU?) pile on, things will get even noisier. The dark side of the moon offers hope, but it's still a lot of addiional awkwardness and expense that could be avoided with better attention to "the commons".