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The Large UV Optical Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR) is NASA's next planned flagship telescope following the James Webb Space Telescope, and a direct successor to Hubble covering the 0.1 μm (far ultraviolet) to 5 μm (mid-infrared) wavelengths. It may launch with either an 8-meter mirror or a larger 15-meter mirror. The latter would have required the Space Launch System (SLS) Block 2's large payload fairing, but now SpaceX's Big "Falcon" Rocket (BFR) is in contention:
Conceptualized to follow in the footsteps of NASA's current space telescope expertise and (hopefully) to learn from the many various mistakes made by their contractors, the LUVOIR (shorthand for Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor) concept is currently grouped into two different categories, A and B. A is a full-scale, uncompromised telescope with an unfathomably vast 15-meter primary mirror and a sunshade with an area anywhere from 5000 to 20000 square meters (1-4 acres). B is a comparatively watered-down take on the broadband surveyor telescope, with a much smaller 8-meter primary mirror, likely accompanied by a similarly reduced sunshade (and price tag, presumably).
[...] The reason LUVOIR's conceptual design was split into two sizes is specifically tied to the question of launch, with LUVOIR B's 8m size cap dictated by the ~5 meter-diameter payload fairings prevalent and readily available in today's launch industry.
LUVOIR A's 15-meter mirror, however, would require an equally massive payload fairing. At least at the start, LUVOIR A was conceptualized with NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) Block 2 as the launch vehicle, a similarly conceptual vehicle baselined with a truly massive 8.4 or 10-meter diameter payload fairing, much larger than anything flown to this day. However, the utterly unimpressive schedule performance of the SLS Block 1 development – let alone Block 1B or 2 – has undoubtedly sown more than a little doubt over the expectation of its availability for launching LUVOIR and other huge spacecraft. As a result, NASA has reportedly funded the exploration of alternative launch vehicles for the A version of LUVOIR – SpaceX's Cargo BFR variant, in this case.
While only a maximum of 9 meters in diameter, the baselined cargo spaceship's (BFS Cargo) payload bay has been estimated to have a usable volume of approximately 1500 cubic meters, comparing favorably to SLS' 8.4 and 10-meter fairings with ~1000 to ~1700 cubic meters.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday July 10 2018, @09:11PM (1 child)
Launch two of the B version of the telescope. Place them at opposite sides of the same orbit such that they are just over 2 AU apart. That is, just a bit greater than Earth's orbit but at opposite sides of the sun. Now you have a really big "functional diameter" for the combined telescope and could get really good resolution.
What is the drawback to two teeny tiny 8 meter telescopes 2 AU apart? Light gathering?
Since much of what you want to look at is probably along the plane of the solar system, maybe place their 2 AU orbit at a 90 degree angle to the plane of the solar system?
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 10 2018, @10:23PM
You only get to take advantage of their functional diameter to get better resolution if you can coherently combine their light, which for optical wavelengths has to be done real-time before it falls on a detector (radio astronomers can get away with doing it in post-processing because they can digitize and time-tag the arriving radio waves with sufficient precision at each telescope because radio waves are relatively HUGE--meters to tens of meters as compared to hundreds of nanometers for optical).
NASA and others have looked at this idea, which is basically taking some form of the two optical interferometers we've seen recently in stories here, and putting them in space. The really hard part continues to be the ability to measure and compensate for changes in optical pathlength in real-time for things that aren't sitting on really nice and stable hunks of bedrock, like the ground-based interferometers are.