James Webb Space Telescope emerges successfully from final thermal vacuum test

Re:James Webb Space Telescope emerges successfully from fina... by toomuchtodo on Friday May 31, 2019 @05:46PM (#20065294)

In some StarLink thread on /r/spacex, someone was mentioning that you can't do IR/optical light interferometry without being able to measure the phase of light, and someone else said we're pretty close to being able to.

If you're able to deploy orbital observatories with a StarLink sort of cadence (keep throwing up cheap satellites as quickly as possible), would you think we'd reach more mature observation tech faster? Maybe observing from Earth is dead long term if you drive innovation up and costs down with the observing systems and the supporting data transport networks.

TLDR How do we make decades of progress in years instead?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:James Webb Space Telescope emerges successfully from fina... by petschge on Friday May 31, 2019 @05:53PM (#20065349)

Being able to iterate rapidly might be helpful to get tech of the ground into space once we have it. But right now even Earth-bound optical interferometry is in its infancy compared to optical astronomy and radio interferometry. It is an interesting subject of research for method development, but we are far away from an instrument that is sufficiently well understood to be useful.

[ Parent | on HN ]