[stargazer-3]

The collecting time is important, but mainly to 1) sample the rotation of the Earth in the Fourier space for better angular resolution and 2) for raising your overall signal-to-noise ratio is the image (but the one released is already pretty good, so not much improvement can be done there unless you're trying to go for the faint features in the image).

Unfortunately, you can only do interferometry with simultaneous measurements (we need information about the difference in the phase of light hitting the receiving antennas), so the motion of Earth around the Sun is largely irrelevant, unless you can park another antenna at a trailing orbit (see space VLBI for that).

What you're thinking of is probably parallax measurements of distance - that's how missions like Gaia can pinpoint distances to stars in Milky Way (and some in its satellites as well).

[alkonaut]

Thanks.

We seem to need a big radiotelescope on the moon then? That should give simultaneous measurement on a much larger baseline?

[petschge]

I doesn't even need to be that big. A 60 meter dish would do nicely.

Problem is, you would want to have several Gigahertz of (radio) bandwidth. You are not going to down link that raw, but rather as a number of channels, integrated over a number of microseconds and digitized at something between 4 and 64 samples per bit, but we are still talking a down link data rate of gigabits per second.