[ExI] Arkyd

Alfio Puglisi alfio.puglisi at gmail.com
Sun Jun 2 19:26:17 UTC 2013


On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 6:11 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 6:12 AM, Alfio Puglisi <alfio.puglisi at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> What? After lining up such an impressive list of "investors", as they
>> call them:
>>
>> http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/
>>
>> now they need kickstarter to raise $1M? Must be a joke
>>
>
> Every source of funding.  Also, this may be more PR than
> actual fundraising.
>

I agree it's most likely a PR move. By the way, I am a little surprised by
how small the Arkyd telescope really is. A diameter of 20 cm? I had
previously read most of Planetary Resources' web site, but the size of the
Arkyd had escaped me for some reason. Being so small, it will have a
resolving power of about 1 arcsecond - about the same as you can get on the
ground ! Basically, you don't need to send such a telescope in orbit,
except maybe to gain some wavelength coverage. But for the same $1M, you
could buy hundreds of commercially available 20cm telescopes. So yes, it's
PR and PR only. Maybe it's useful as a training system to remotely operate
stuff in orbit. Whatever, I'm a bit disappointed.

Alfio
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