this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
130 points (97.8% liked)

Astronomy

3993 readers
3 users here now

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Imagine one orbiting each planet and what we can observe.

[โ€“] stsquad@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

I can imagine it but it certainly won't be practical to implement in our lifetimes. There are certainly some observatories that benefit from being based in space (optical and infrared) and even gravitational detectors such as laser interferometers. However aside from the wide capture area radio telescopes need large amounts of compute to separate the signal from the noise. The amount of data that needs to be processed makes space based radio observatories very hard to implement.

Maybe the dark side of the moon will make a decent observatory one day but we haven't set foot on the place for decades, let alone built anything so complex.