[extropy-chat] SPACE: Applications for mass produced spacecraft

[Mike Lorrey]

Continuing our earlier conversation on another thread, I have found an
application which is pure science that really requires being mass
produced, even more than the interferometer proposal.

It is another terrestrial planet finder, the Kepler telescope,
http://kepler.nasa.gov/sci/basis/fov.html which will use a massive
photometer to stare at one patch of sky for several years looking for
planetary transits across 100,000 stars at once. It promises to be very
effective, but has a weakness: it looks at only one field of view,
about 29 degrees across, its whole life. What is really needed with
this sort of telescope, which would find candidates for the
interferometer program to study in closer detail, are a large number of
these to cover the entire night sky, particularly other areas of our
own local neighborhood, the Orion Arm of the galaxy. 

Such a constellation would require somewhere about 82 Kepler-class
telescopes to cover the entire sky, though we might exclude 12 that
would cover the plane of the ecliptic, so about 70 ought to do the job,
though putting the other 12 on high angle long duration cometary orbits
would help them observe the stars in the plane of the ecliptic while
avoiding the planets, the sun, and many KBOs.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
Founder, Constitution Park Foundation:
http://constitutionpark.blogspot.com
Personal/political blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

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