| That depends on the wave length regime. Radio is firmly ground based, because you need huge dishes and potentially many (thousands) of them, at very precisely known distances. IR is mostly space based (with SOFIA and ALMA the notable exception) because of atmospheric absorption. Optical is firmly ground based, due to much lower cost for large telescopes. (See https://doi.org/10.1117/1.2031216 for the factors that affect cost). The notable exceptions are Hubble and satellites monitoring the sun such as Stereo and SDO. X-Ray is space based again due to atmosphere. Gamma-ray telescopes are an interesting mix between ground based air cherenkov telescopes (IACTs such as Hess, Magic and Veritas) and water cherenkov detektors such as HAWK and space based Fermi (with relatively poor sensitivity and low upper energy cut off, but very wide field of view). Neutrino detectors are firmly ground based because the need huge detectors (the cubic kilometer of icecube is basically the lower limit). So they are very much complementary. And some things will probably never moved to space, even if launch was free. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...