Space shield could help image Earthlike planets
posted by Deep Hal at 4:05:00 AM
Thursday, July 06, 2006
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2 Comments:
Seems rather impractical to me. If the shade and the telescope were in similar but offset orbits, wouldn't than imply that it could only be used for planets in the plane of that orbit?
Their idea seems to be, to put the duo, a million miles from Earth, and let them orbit, in tandem, 15,000 miles from each other. The impractical idea .. as I see it ... is the big "gas tank" required to move the shield, all over the place, in order to blank out all the desired, NEARBY candidate stars.
I think the idea is terrific ... you just need dozens of the shields, to minimize the amount of transit required. As far as I can tell, you would have to position the shield (at various times) in a 15,000 mile radius, centered on the space telescope. With dozens of starshades, you could just have each one move, to cover it's small patch of the "sphere" that surrounded the space telescope.
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