This is a very bad article. NASA has investigated how a lensless mirrorless telescope could actually be made using photonic integrated circuits[0]. There are even mass benefits too.

[0]https://www.nasa.gov/content/low-mass-planar-photonic-imagin...

Still has lenslets, but really fricking cool! Thanks for the link.

If this sounded like a bad idea to you, and you wondered what new tech made this possible - there is no new tech mentioned and you can safely skip the article.

It’s basically just a list of reasons why this does not work at all.

I thought they were going to talk about diffractive optic telescopes which require neither lenses or mirrors. See more here https://str.llnl.gov/str/March03/pdfs/03_03.2.pdf. Someone did not do their research! The aragoscope is mentioned in the Spacetime episode mentioned elsewhere here.

There is also a sensor stack for different wavelengths that is actually realized, not a pipe dream like the article makes it seem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor

Like this one?

http://www.lofar.org/about-lofar/general-information/introdu...

Aaaah, LOFAR, also known among the students of Groningen from 2005 as "the reason why I can download at 15MiB per second for 10 Euros per month".

(They implemented the data infrastructure before the sensors were active, so there was a lot of bandwidth to spare. No idea how things are now)

Because it's really hard to arrange for gravitational lenses in the directions and distances you want to observe?

This PBS Space Time episode [1] covers quite a few possible designs for space telescopes without heavy lenses or mirrors.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BIASPc89Sgk

How about phased arrays? http://m.caltech.edu/news/ultra-thin-camera-creates-images-w...

It's not:

    	Why Don't We Build a Telescope Without Mirrors or Lenses?

It's:

    	Why We Don't Build a Telescope Without Mirrors or Lenses.