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Re:Four Earth-sized planets detected orbiting the nearest su... by BurningFrog on Thursday August 10, 2017 @05:31PM (#14984512)
Aside from turbulence, gigantic earth bound telescopes struggle with weight and fragility of the giant mirrors.

That aspect is also much easier in space. Once you get it out there, which is hard...

Re:Four Earth-sized planets detected orbiting the nearest su... by ExactoKnight on Thursday August 10, 2017 @06:12PM (#14984825)
The James Webb Space Telescope, nicknamed the telescope that ate astronomy, has cost an enormous amount of money due to the need to get everything aligned absolutely perfect before launching because there will be no chance for repair.

In comparison, with adaptive optics ground based telescopes have a lot more leeway to be fixed and corrected.

(That said, if astronomical interferometry can achieve the same result as a 100Metre telescope, then let's do it that way! How is less important than making sure we have something in our pipeline within the next decade that can be capable of directly measuring the spectra of exoplanets.)

Re:Four Earth-sized planets detected orbiting the nearest su... by gammarator on Friday August 11, 2017 @11:27AM (#14990633)
Extremely large telescopes use segmented mirrors to avoid this problem.
Re:Four Earth-sized planets detected orbiting the nearest su... by reindeerer on Friday August 11, 2017 @02:14PM (#14992679)
here is a telescope idea that is theoretically super scalable

http://www.pellegrino.caltech.edu/aarest1/