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by valarauca1 3445 days ago
Stilling waiting for when we put a radio telescope at L3 and L2 giving mankind a 14Tm baseline interferometry. The current 12Mm interferometry is nice, but earth is so small.
2 comments

Radio scintillation of the Interstellar Medium becomes an issue, I daresay the radio equivalent of "active optics" could help.

I did mention this at an outreach talk with Astroblack morphologies[0] and Tim O'Brien[1] who pointed out that ISM scintillation was on his slides

I did think up 100s of radio telescopes in a bird cage orbit at the distance of Jupiter, impractical of course but Space VLBI does reward thinking big.

Isn't it worth having telescopes well out the ecliptic plane, I seem to recollect VLBI is about filling in the UV plane. It was a long time ago, and it was just a second year physics project.

[0] - http://www.artscatalyst.org/astro-black-morphologies-flow-mo...

[1] - http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~tob/

We have something along those lines, albeit not quite as long-baseline. Spektr-R is a radio satellite on a elliptical orbit that gives baselines up to 350,000 km (0.35 Gm), linked to Earth-based facilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spektr-R