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342 points divbzero | 93 comments | | HN request time: 2.039s | source | bottom
1. GMoromisato ◴[] No.44401068[source]
In case anyone is wondering, we are (sadly) very far from getting an image of this planet (or any extra-solar planet) that is more than 1 pixel across.

At 110 light-years distance you would need a telescope ~450 kilometers across to image this planet at 100x100 pixel resolution--about the size of a small icon. That is a physical limit based on the wavelength of light.

The best we could do is build a space-based optical interferometer with two nodes 450 kilometers apart, but synchronized to 1 wavelength. That's a really tough engineering challenge.

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2. nico ◴[] No.44401110[source]
How big would the telescope/mirror/lens need to be to get a picture of something in the Alpha Centauri system, 4.37 light years away?

Also, could the image be created by “scanning” a big area and then composing the image from a bunch of smaller ones?

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3. bravesoul2 ◴[] No.44401184[source]
L2 is moving though right? Or does it need to be simultaneously receiving at the 2 points?
replies(1): >>44401252 #
4. GMoromisato ◴[] No.44401252[source]
Sadly, it has to be simultaneous.

My (tenuous) understanding of interferometry is that you receive light from two points separated by a baseline and then combine that light in such a way that the wavelengths match up and reinforce at appropriate points.

Wikipedia has a decent summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis

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5. behnamoh ◴[] No.44401253[source]
Yet another reminder that space is huge and no matter how big we can imagine, due to the realities of physics, there is a good chance that we might never be able to reach the far stars and galaxies.
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6. m3kw9 ◴[] No.44401265[source]
Didn’t China able to shoot lasers to the moon orbit for comms?
7. GMoromisato ◴[] No.44401269[source]
It's linear, so if it is 25 times closer then the telescope can be 25 times smaller. At 4.37 light-years we'd need an 18 kilometer telescope to image at Jupiter-sized planet at 100x100 pixel resolution.

If you only wanted 10x10 resolution you could get by with a 1.8 kilometer telescope.

Wikipedia has more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution. The Rayleigh criterion is the equation to calculate this.

8. GolfPopper ◴[] No.44401398[source]
We can do better than that! Using the Sun as a gravitation lens[1], and a probe at a focal point of 542 AU, we could get 25km scale surface resolution on a planet 98 ly away. [2] This would be an immense and time-consuming endeavor, but does seem to be within humanity's current technological capabilities.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

2. https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...

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9. kilroy123 ◴[] No.44401440[source]
I was going to post the same exact thing and links.

Of all the possible space probes or missions we could do. I want this one more than any of them!

10. JumpCrisscross ◴[] No.44401445[source]
Do we have a recent cost estimate?
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11. grues-dinner ◴[] No.44401498[source]
The depressing, if that's the right word, counterpoint to all the "oh my god it's fun of stars" deep fields crammed with millions of galaxies per square arcsecond is that the expansion of the universe means that nearly all of them are permanently and irrevocably out of reach even with near-lightspeed travel: they'll literally wink out of observable reality before we could ever get to them, leaving only a few nearby galaxies in the sky. At best you can reach the handful of gravitationally-bound galaxies in the local group.

Not that the Milky Way is a small place, but even most sci-fi featuring FTL and all sorts of handwaves has to content itself with shenanigans confined to a single galaxy due to the mindblowing, and accelerating, gaps between galaxies.

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12. GMoromisato ◴[] No.44401520[source]
Agreed! This might be easier than an interferometer. You just need a lot of delta-v
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13. twothreeone ◴[] No.44401602{3}[source]
"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt."
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14. sho_hn ◴[] No.44401675{4}[source]
It's cynical to assume OP was gunning for "it's too expensive". They might just want to know the size of the challenge to get it done.
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15. sho_hn ◴[] No.44401697{3}[source]
It's a shame, but in a glass-falf-full sense the fact that this planet is our little boat in the ocean and all that we got is also a quite helpful focusing reminder and scope constraint.

That the stars are beyond reach might be depressing, how aggresively we are gambling our little boat is on the other hand actively scary and perhaps the dominant limit on humanity's effective reach.

16. twothreeone ◴[] No.44401845{5}[source]
And it's ironic to scold others for missing a point while missing their point. All good though.
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17. os2warpman ◴[] No.44401969[source]
A maintenance-free power source capable of lasting the 200 or so years it would take to make it to 542 AU does not seem within humanity's current technological capabilities.

Parker at its highest velocity could make it there in a century, but it doesn't have to slow down and stop. Or station keep.

When we have a power source that can do 5kW (I just doubled Hubble, 542 AU would probably require much more for communications) for 100 years I'll agree that its design can be refined and its lifespan extended to 200 and 542 AU is within our reach.

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18. nandomrumber ◴[] No.44402006[source]
For scale, Voyager 1 is about 167 AU away.
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19. amanaplanacanal ◴[] No.44402014{6}[source]
I missed it too. What was your point?
20. UltraSane ◴[] No.44402038[source]
Biological humans won't reach the stars but our immortal robotic offspring can.
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21. bigiain ◴[] No.44402072{3}[source]
I'd guess less then 1 or 2 hyped AI startup valuations that eventually collapse to nothing.
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22. rishav_sharan ◴[] No.44402168[source]
I think Tipping of the Cool Worlds youtube channel did a video that we can just use earth for the gravitational lensing and that would be far cheaper

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jgOTZe07eHA

23. joshvm ◴[] No.44402225[source]
It's a lot easier to reason about this using angular resolution, because that's normally what the diffraction limit formula is in reference to. If you know the angular diameter of the system (α) and the wavelength (say λ=500 nm for visible), you can use α ≈ λ/d and solve for the aperture of the telescope (d).

That puts a basic limit on the smallest thing you can resolve with a given aperture. You can use the angular diameter of the planet and the resolution you're after. For Alpha Centauri A it's 8.5 milli arc-second, so O(1 μas) for a 100px image? That's just for the star!

The Event Horizon Telescope can achieve around 20-25 μas in microwave; you need a planet-scale interferometer to do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope It's possible to do radio measurements in sync with good clocks and fast sampling/storage, much harder with visible.

I'm not super up to date on visible approaches, but there is LISA which will be a large scale interferometer in space. The technology for synchronising the satellites is similar to what you'd need for this in the optical.

https://www.edmundoptics.com/knowledge-center/application-no...

https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0303634

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24. cedws ◴[] No.44402272{3}[source]
How do you decelerate once you get there though?
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25. dotnet00 ◴[] No.44402336{3}[source]
With distances that big, is it even necessary to slow down much? The depth of focus is probably a couple dozen AU? Even if it takes the probe a century to get there, if you can squeeze a decade or two of observation out of it without slowing down, there's no reason to bother and instead send a new upgraded telescope every decade or so.

As far as power requirements go, assuming a doubled power demand from Hubble might be a bit excessive. A telescope that far out would have to be nuclear powered, so thermal regulation is 'free'/passive and RCS load is reduced (don't have to constantly adjust to point away from the Earth), which I expect are the biggest power draws on Hubble.

If we assume a 150 year lifetime, with a 3kW draw by EOL and current RTG tech... RTGs have ~6% efficiency, so for 3kW electricity, you need 50kW in heat. RTG electricity output drops ~2% per year, so after 150 years, you have 5% of the initial electrical output, and you get ~0.57W/g of Pu-238. Meaning, you need ~600kg of it to power the telescope this way [https://www.mathscinotes.com/2012/01/nuclear-battery-math/].

That's not a politically feasible amount, but it's not technically impossible with current/near future tech whose development could be spurred on by serious interest in this kind of mission.

'Proper' fission reactors can also do the job, you get higher efficiency and don't have to run the reactors for the entire 150 years besides accounting for decay (e.g. an RTG that needs to provide enough power to keep some clocks running, the electronics and batteries warm, and trigger whatever mechanism would start up the reactor). Probably less than 100kg of Pu-238 just by better reactor efficiency.

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26. jmyeet ◴[] No.44402344[source]
Take this even further and it eliminates a whole bunch of possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox.

If, like me, you believe the future of any civilization (including ours) is a Dyson Swarm then you end up with hundreds of millions of orbitals around the Sun between, say, the orbits of Venus and Mars. It's not crowded either. The mean distance between orbitals is ~100,000km.

People often ask why would anyone do this? Easy. Two reasons: land area (per unit mass) and energy. With 10 billion people, that'd be land about the size of Africa each with each person having an energy budget of about the solar output hitting the Earth, a truly incomprehensibly large amount of energy.

So instead of a telescope 450km wide (fia optical interferometry), you have orbitals that are up to ~400 million kilometers apart. The resolution with which you could view very distance worlds is unimaginably high.

Why does this eliminate Fermi Paradox proposed solutions? One idea is that advanced civilizations hide. There is no hiding from a K2 civilization.

27. GMoromisato ◴[] No.44402363{4}[source]
By “delta-v” I mean propellant budget, not initial velocity. So you spend half your delta-v to accelerate out and the other half to decelerate.

But of course, the initial delta-v costs a lot of propellant because it has to push an almost full tank. By the time we have to decelerate the ship will be a lot lighter.

That’s why you needed a full Saturn 3rd stage to send Apollo to the moon, but just the service module to get back to Earth.

I realize now that “a lot of delta-v” is an understatement. 500 AUs is ridiculously far. To get there in under a century you’d need fission-fraction reactors, well beyond our current tech.

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28. ycui1986 ◴[] No.44402372{4}[source]
i don't think modern semiconductor device will last more than 100 years, even without all the radiation. making something last more than a few decades is very hard.
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29. ycui1986 ◴[] No.44402383[source]
There are also alternative proposals to use Earth's atmosphere refraction for focusing, in a geometrically similar fashion as gravitational lens. It seems more feasible than using Sun's gravitational lensing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_atmospheric_lens

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30. vlovich123 ◴[] No.44402398[source]
I thought modern telescopes use software to merge images across a period of time / from multiple telescopes to get a significantly higher resolution than that achieved through the physical limitation of light. At least that’s how all the spy telescopes work and how various ground based telescopes collaborate afaik.

That’s in addition to gravitational lensing effects.

31. kristopolous ◴[] No.44402435[source]
There was an article I saw about how long it would take the fastest spacecraft built with "non-speculative" physics - phenomena that has actually been observed in labs or in nature, ignoring any manufacturing and budget infeasibility (as in no handwaving sci-fi) and we're still talking like an entire lifetime to the next star.

In a way we're kind of still like an ancient village who can only travel by boats made of reeds

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32. runarberg ◴[] No.44402453{3}[source]
Unlikely. There are both economical and moral reasons to never build a self replicating robotic fleet of probes. I think a sufficiently advanced civilization will always prefer telescopes over probes for anything more distant then the nearest couple of solar systems.

Just to ring the point home, we are technically (but not yet economically) capable of creating small telescopes which use our sun as a gravitational lens, which would be able to take photographs of exoplanets. In the far future we could potentially build very large telescopes which can do the same and see very distant objects with a fine resolution. That would be a much better investment then to send out self replicating robotic probes.

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33. schobi ◴[] No.44402481{3}[source]
How far off are we still for doing this with visual light?

Let's say you build single photon detectors and ultra precise time stamping. Would that get us near? Today, maybe we don't have femtosecond time stamping and detectors yet. But that is something I can imagine being built! Timing reference distribution within fs over 100s of km? Up to now, nobody needed that I guess.

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34. kadoban ◴[] No.44402526{5}[source]
> I realize now that “a lot of delta-v” is an understatement. 500 AUs is ridiculously far. To get there in under a century you’d need fission-fraction reactors, well beyond our current tech.

Voyager 1 is 166 AU away, it launched about 50 years ago. So wouldn't we just have to do about twice as well as that, or launch 2 of them in opposite directions? That sounds _very_ hard (Voyager is amazing), but it can't be beyond our current tech, right? We did fairly close to that 50 years ago.

35. kadoban ◴[] No.44402536{3}[source]
Is there another limit in terms of just: how many photons from X object even hit an area of Y telescope apeture size from distance Z in like, say a year? We can't see the thing if no photons from it even intersect our telescope, right? Or maybe that limit is way way less restrictive than the other...
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36. os2warpman ◴[] No.44402566{4}[source]
I agree with you.

It is indeed spherical frictionless cow-ly possible if we spend a trillion dollars to increase ORNL's annual Pu production capacity so that it doesn't take 200 years to make 600kg of Pu-238.

When someone demonstrates a complex device (let's set aside power generation how about a valve? Or a capacitor?) that can last a century in space I'll agree that it is actually possible.

That's what "current level of technology" means. The lego bricks exist, now, today, preferably in stock ready for immediate shipment on Digikey, and can be snapped into place.

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37. yongjik ◴[] No.44402585[source]
LIGO (the famous gravity wave detector) is made of two 4-kilometer arms. According to its website:

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts

> At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to detect a change in distance between its mirrors 1/10,000th the width of a proton! This is equivalent to noticing a change in distance to the nearest star (some 4.2 light years away) of the width of a human hair.

So I think two telescopes at 450km distance synchronized to "merely" (haha) a visible light's wavelength should be doable, if we throw a fuckton of money on that.

38. hnaccount_rng ◴[] No.44402644{4}[source]
The number of photons themselves is not too restrictive (i think the voyager probe still emits 6ish photons per second directed at the receiving dish). And we easily build sensors that detect every photon (far above 99% levels). The tricky part will be differentiating between “source photons” and “background photons” (for Voyager we exactly know what to look for, here we wouldn’t have any baseline for distinguishing)
39. fsckboy ◴[] No.44402661[source]
>In case anyone is wondering, we are (sadly) very far from getting an image of this planet (or any extra-solar planet) that is more than 1 pixel across.

the image on the linked website is more than 1 pixel across: what are you saying? it's false/fake?

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40. shit_game ◴[] No.44402689[source]
I just wanna say that this an exemplary comment. This is the kind if thing i read hn coments for.
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41. dmos62 ◴[] No.44402715{4}[source]
Thank you for the chuckle.
42. quailfarmer ◴[] No.44402789[source]
The resolution of the image (the ability to resolve two points) is greater than the size of the planet, thus it appears as a point spread function, no detail can be resolved.
43. gsliepen ◴[] No.44402874[source]
If you drop the requirement that the image has to be taken with wavelengths our eyes are sensitive to, you could image it using radio telescopes. We already have this capability, the problem though with radio interferometry is that while you can get an effectively huge aperture, the contrast level will be very low, and I am guessing that after subtracting the signal from the star, the signal from the planet will not be above the noise level. Note that optical interferometers would have the same problem.
44. HPsquared ◴[] No.44403123{4}[source]
Those are just financial transactions though, not actual loss of much engineering time etc.
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45. whitehexagon ◴[] No.44403215[source]
Even a single pixel in the IR range is pretty cool, but something inside me wants the RGB pixel color in visible light range.

Is that a case of un redshifting this pixel, or needing the optical inferometer you mentioned with multiple single frequency filters.

Or something new? like a LHC style accelerator, or space based rail gun, to fire off a continuous stream of tiny cube sats towards the target, and using the stream itself as a comms channel back.

Yeah I know, this planet is burning, and all that effort for a RGB wallpaper seems crazy, but 'space stuff' also brings knowledge and hope.

46. nurettin ◴[] No.44403257{5}[source]
ouch I thought I was cynical
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47. seanhunter ◴[] No.44403259{3}[source]
You’re never going to break into popular science reporting with that sort of attitude. If you are going to do the scale of a small thing, you have to compare it to the size of a banana or the width of a hair if it’s very small. For larger things, “football pitches” are the standard, although “blue whales” and “double-decker busses” are also acceptable units in some circumstances.

So, for scale, Voyager 1 is about 2.5 x 10^11 regulation football pitches away although they vary in size so it could be anywhere between 2.08 x 10^11 and 2.8 x 10^11. Now, see how much more relatable that is for a common person?

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48. thiht ◴[] No.44403288{3}[source]
And more importantly, a story points estimate (t-shirt sizing is obviously XL)
replies(1): >>44403770 #
49. perlgeek ◴[] No.44403439[source]
It would be really cool to have an array of space-based telescopes spaced out evenly in the Earth's orbit around the sun, and use each as relay for the others that cannot directly communicate with Earth, because the path is blocked by the Sun.

Then you could do observations outside the solar system's orbital plane with a 2 AU synthetic aperture. And maybe even do double duty as a gravitational wave observatory.

(And yes, this is currently more science fiction than science, but it's at least plausible that we can build such a thing one day).

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50. nandomrumber ◴[] No.44403448{4}[source]
Smoots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot
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51. ◴[] No.44403478{6}[source]
52. perihelions ◴[] No.44403500{3}[source]
[deleted]
replies(1): >>44403948 #
53. xg15 ◴[] No.44403566{5}[source]
We should definitely use TeraSmoots more as an astronomically unit.
replies(1): >>44410111 #
54. ainiriand ◴[] No.44403770{4}[source]
Lets get an epic ticket ready.
55. throw0101c ◴[] No.44403929[source]
> At 110 light-years distance you would need a telescope ~450 kilometers across to image this planet at 100x100 pixel resolution--about the size of a small icon.

Or use two (or more) telescopes that are 450km apart:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis

* https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7852

56. varjag ◴[] No.44403948{4}[source]
It then would have to brake..
replies(1): >>44405454 #
57. drgiran ◴[] No.44403949[source]
Synchronization is solvable, and why stop at two? You could have a three-dimensional array of them, spread over very large distances. We have the technology now to pull this off.
58. griffzhowl ◴[] No.44403987{4}[source]
Wouldn't there be a problem putting 600kg (or even 100kg) of Pu-238 together, because of supercriticality? I couldn't think of a plausible design, but I know next to nothing about this area. Basically I've heard that if you put a lot of this stuff together it'll make a big explosion
replies(1): >>44405063 #
59. jodrellblank ◴[] No.44404073{3}[source]
Might be Charles Stross’s blog post The High Frontier: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high...
60. UltraSane ◴[] No.44404125{4}[source]
"There are both economical and moral reasons to never build a self replicating robotic fleet of probes."

Such as?

" I think a sufficiently advanced civilization will always prefer telescopes over probes for anything more distant then the nearest couple of solar systems."

What part of "immortal" don't you understand? traveling at 1% of c doesn't feel slow if you just turn off or slow down your brain during the trip.

replies(1): >>44404802 #
61. parpfish ◴[] No.44404611[source]
Do these scientist know they can just say “enhance”?
replies(1): >>44404860 #
62. cubefox ◴[] No.44404634{3}[source]
> A maintenance-free power source capable of lasting the 200 or so years it would take to make it to 542 AU

It wouldn't take nearly that long. The proposal is to use solar sails. There is a nice video about the details on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

63. joshvm ◴[] No.44404688{4}[source]
The biggest issue is the sheer separation required. EHT operates in mm wave light, visible is 4-6 orders of magnitude shorter wavelength. There are several smaller scale interferometers. They can already do quite impressive things because even a 50m baseline is better than any optical telescope that exists.

The way that timing works for EHT is each station has a GPS reference that's conditioned with a very good atomic clock - for example at SPT we use a hydrogen maser. The readout and timing system is separate from the normal telescope control system, we just make sure the dish is tracking the right spot before we need to start saving data (sampling around 64 Gbps).

I'm not sure what the timing requirements are for visible and how the clock is distributed, but syncing clocks extremely well over long distances shouldn't be insurmountable. LISA needs to solve this problem for gravitational waves and that's a million+ km baseline.

Some problems go away in space. You obviously need extremely accurate station keeping (have a look how LISA Pathfinder does it, very cool), but on Earth we also have to take continental drift into account.

64. runarberg ◴[] No.44404802{5}[source]
I would expect that the probe makers would want some benefits from the fleet of probes they sent, the only benefit I can think of to be had are information about far away objects, which is of scientific value. The probe’s makers will therefor have to keep contact with an ever expanding fleet of probes and sift through an exponentially increasing amount of information for millions of years. This just does not seem practical when you can just build a telescope. Now time may not pass that slowly from the perspective of the probe, but for the civilization on the homeworld, this method is painfully slow. They could have built thousands or millions of telescopes during that time to gather the same information (albeit of lower quality). Which is why you would probably want to probe your nearest neighboring solar systems, but nothing farther.

As for the moral reasons to not send out a fleet of self replicating probes. These are an extreme pollution hazard. An ever expanding fleet of robots traveling across the galaxy over millions of years, growing in numbers exponentially, exploiting resources in foreign worlds, with nothing to stop them if something happens to their makers. Over millions of years these things would be everywhere, and—in the best case—be a huge nuisance, but at worse they would be a risk to the public safety of the worlds they travel to. With these risks I believe a sufficiently advanced civilization would just build telescopes for their exploration needs.

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65. le-mark ◴[] No.44404822{5}[source]
Does encasing electronics in lead help against high energy cosmic rays? With cheap kg to orbit one could assume the mass budget would be large.
replies(1): >>44413877 #
66. j_not_j ◴[] No.44404832[source]
Wouldn't be worth the trouble to try.

Why, you ask?

How do you point it? Where do you point it?

You have a "telescope" with a field of view of one-planets worth of pixels. But the planet is in orbit, so it drifts away from the imaged field of view within minutes.

Meanwhile your sensor is travelling away from the "lens" so transverse velocity would be needed to track the orbit at a delta-v and direction that is unknowable. Unknowable, because you have to know where the planet is, within a radius, to put your "sensor" in the right place in the first place.

Imagine taking a straw, place it in a tree, walk away a few km and focus a telescope on the straw and hope to look through the straw to see an airplane flying past. You have the same set of unknowables.

replies(1): >>44405211 #
67. le-mark ◴[] No.44404860[source]
As someone who’s sat in meeting with nontechnical people and having heard this exact request (“can’t you just enhance the image?”) I felt this.
68. le-mark ◴[] No.44404878{3}[source]
Does size of the planet matter? How about using Saturn or Jupiter?
replies(1): >>44405026 #
69. Balgair ◴[] No.44405026{4}[source]
Yes, the larger the object you're using as a lens, the better the image. This is due to the 'Lens Makers' Equation'. Larger objects like Earth, Jupiter, or the Sun would make for larger radii and therefore better resolution.
70. ben_w ◴[] No.44405063{5}[source]
Criticality isn't hard to avoid, just split it between e.g. 344 units arranged in a 7x7x7 cube with 10cm gaps each way. Or more, I picked that separation and mass division based on guessing.
replies(1): >>44406831 #
71. __MatrixMan__ ◴[] No.44405211{3}[source]
I won't argue that it would be worth the effort, but it would be interesting to set something like that going and just keep scanning. A few years worth of data might turn up interesting things even if it wasn't particularly useful for finding those things a second time.
72. minitoar ◴[] No.44405454{5}[source]
Or just keep launching more so there’s always a usable one
73. fpoling ◴[] No.44405777{3}[source]
Project Orion-type space craft can archive 1000 km/s and can travel within 3 years 542 AU. And this is absolutely feasible technically, just not politically.
74. alex_young ◴[] No.44406337{5}[source]
Considering that the longest continually operating computer is in Voyager 2 and has been running for nearly 50 years I would be surprised if this was actually a problem. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/635980-lo...
75. UltraSane ◴[] No.44406507{6}[source]
You don't understand. The "probes" WOULD BE the creators. Biological life is far too fragile to survive interstellar travel but AI running on much more durable hardware makes it downright easy.

And they wouldn't have to be inherently self-replicating.

When you can live millions of years your idea of what is "slow" changes pretty drastically.

76. catlifeonmars ◴[] No.44406627[source]
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20236
77. griffzhowl ◴[] No.44406831{6}[source]
Yeah, I thought about doing something like that, but that would make many parallel power-generating units that would only last as long as one unit wouldn't it? Maybe the individual units could be subdivided further and the subunits could be brought together only when a previous unit runs out of power. I don't know enough about how it would actually work
replies(1): >>44407406 #
78. ben_w ◴[] No.44407406{7}[source]
I don't think so. The radioisotope itself is an exponential decay, and only goes faster when critical, not when subdivided; the part I'm not sure about is the thermocouple and why that decays.
replies(1): >>44409380 #
79. JumpCrisscross ◴[] No.44407493{5}[source]
I’m genuinely curious what it would cost given recent launch-cost and fabrication advances. If above $10bn, we should keep working on those inputs. If below, it strikes me as more promising than another circular collider.
80. littlestymaar ◴[] No.44408076[source]
Why can't we use the motion of the telescope in space to make a synthetic aperture like SAR imagery satellites do?
81. ◴[] No.44408278{5}[source]
82. ◴[] No.44408442{3}[source]
83. Dylan16807 ◴[] No.44408850{5}[source]
> It is indeed spherical frictionless cow-ly possible if we spend a trillion dollars to increase ORNL's annual Pu production capacity so that it doesn't take 200 years to make 600kg of Pu-238.

Oh come on, we used to make so much more of it.

I see estimates that it costs 4 million dollars per pound, plus some scaling costs?

A trillion dollars is not even close to "spherical frictionless cow" when the benchmark is "humanity's current technological capabilities", and a few billion is basically nothing at that scale.

> When someone demonstrates a complex device (let's set aside power generation how about a valve? Or a capacitor?) that can last a century in space I'll agree that it is actually possible.

Is a bunch of stuff lasting 50 years not good evidence? What is your threshold for "demonstrate", do we have to wait 200 years before you can be convinced?

84. runarberg ◴[] No.44409159{3}[source]
I think this is the solution to the Fermi paradox, that space is simply too big for civilizations across the galaxy too discover each other, let alone interact with each other.

Further more I don't think technologically advanced civilizations will be wasting their time and resources in colonizing new works, space is simply too big for that. And that they would conduct their explorations with telescopes, not probes, space is simply too big for probes.

85. griffzhowl ◴[] No.44409380{8}[source]
I see. So the maximum time these units could provide power is the time it would take a subcritical mass to decay to the point that it's no longer useful. So the idea is unworkable for powering very long journeys
replies(1): >>44411335 #
86. Intralexical ◴[] No.44409646{3}[source]
Has anyone explored using the target planet's mechanical motion? As it rotates and orbits, a different part of it will be lit up every hour (and every season). You only get a single pixel at once, but that pixel is localized to a region that scans across the whole surface over time.

For something Earth-like, I think you could definitely make out the Americas, Asia, and probably Africa. Maybe both of the ice caps too, depending how it's oriented and if you're capturing spectra. ...Somebody should mock up a solver in Python.

I'm sure there are other tricks you could use. Diffraction limit schmraction schmidit, real planets aren't point light sources.

87. GMoromisato ◴[] No.44409697[source]
Thank you!
88. nandomrumber ◴[] No.44410111{6}[source]
1 AU is 0.879 TeraSmoots
89. alex_young ◴[] No.44410496[source]
If you can put an ugly sports car in an earth / mars orbit, surely you can put a few telescopes in some large orbit and figure out a timing source. Seems very much inside the realm of the possible.
90. ben_w ◴[] No.44411335{9}[source]
Very long journies, eventually everything fails. I suspect that we don't have enough practical experience to be confident of any space mission lasting 100 years even when the power supply is fine.

But also, there are other radioisotopes besides the one currently used. The ~90 year half life of the current normal radioisotope is great for current missions, not the only option.

91. chuckadams ◴[] No.44413877{6}[source]
> Does encasing electronics in lead help against high energy cosmic rays?

Makes them worse unless and until you make the shielding several times thicker than anything you'd be able to launch from the ground. Watched one science program that demonstrated it beautifully where the interviewee stuck several balloons on a board and shot at it with a high-powered rifle, popping just one. Then he stuck a metal plate in front of the balloons and shot it, and the resulting shrapnel popped all the balloons behind it. That's a cosmic ray hitting shielding.

That's also an unsolved problem with any Mars trip. Electronics can be built redundantly to recover from cosmic ray hits. Humans not so much.

92. littlestymaar ◴[] No.44416380{3}[source]
> Sadly, it has to be simultaneous.

I don't know the details of how it works, but synthetic aperture radar works thanks to the motion of the satellites, so there must be some situations for which simultaneity isn't required.

93. dotnet00 ◴[] No.44439618{5}[source]
I did say it's politically infeasible.

Producing 600kg of Pu-238 is entirely technically feasible with current level of technology, as it has already been done when the US and USSR built their stockpiles.

Current level of technology means things we are capable of achieving right now, it does not mean that the pieces literally exist ready to use, unless you genuinely believe that the thousands of satellites orbitting our planet are not part of the current level of technology because they're purpose built without using off-the-shelf parts.