Re:Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
by blackrock on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @11:39AM
(#25266753)
Perhaps Lockheed should make a telescope that’s so big, it spans 45 States?
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How spread out can the receivers in a Very Very Large Array be? My understanding is that with radiotelescopy they can be widely dispersed, but I'm far from an expert.
Really, you just need manufacturing/contractors in many places. This part built in Pennsylvania, that one in Michigan.
VLBI arrays [1] are networks of radio telescopes that combine data from multiple instruments spread out over a continent or the whole planet. A network like this emulates a continent-size or a planet-size radio telescope and produces radioastronomy's highest resolution images.
The most sensitive VLBI array is the European VLBI network [2] which spans the sort of scales you have in mind.
A VLBI array can also incorporate space-based nodes, see e.g. [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...