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Comment by bazodedo | Hacker News Reader

How about putting our astronomy experiments into space as well? There'd be no light / em pollution there, as well as no atmospheric interference etc. and, 24/7 free power courtesy of our sun. Id expect orbital observatories to be superior to ground based ones, thinking of Webb, Hubble.

I suppose the only downside is cost. So, the actual problem, is how to tax the shared resource that is our LEO. Aside from that, wed also want to incentivize not leaving space debris in orbit. Require insurance, and perhaps rent for orbital trajectories?

But, without working international order, theres no way thats gonna happen...

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Radio telescopes are hilariously massive. I'm not sure it'd be easy to reproduce their capabilities in space?

Why not? They are massive only because you are limited by earth surface. In space there are no limits, see Radioastron for example, and that was decades ago.

Right now for the price of that one project one could have a humongous radio telescope in orbit without any interference. If only people could really look forward.

> In space there are no limits, see Radioastron for example, and that was decades ago.

Radioastron required cross-correlating the signal with ground-based radio teleacopes in order to do science. The collecting area, dish distributons, etc. would need to be fully replicated in space if one wanted to avoid using ground-based facilities entirely.

Nope. Ot was one of a kind thing only because you could not launch two at the time. With that a-given, ofc the ground-based "other end of the leg" was essential for it to work.

Now we can launch two. Or two dozen. This completely obviates any need for ground listeners as for resulting angular resolution.

Since ground-based radioastronomy has other uses, will stay there anyway and since crosscheck is always better, future long-base radiointerferometry will use legacy ground-based observatories.

We're saying the same thing -- one radioastron satellite isn't enough, you'd need a constellation of them.

> How about putting our astronomy experiments into space as well? There'd be no light / em pollution there, as well as no atmospheric interference etc.

One would need to put the telescopes into fairly high orbits in order to avoid the interference. I think that even images made with the Hubble space telescope have sometimes seen the impact of satellite constellations.

When science is already experiencing a funding stranglehold, how do you expect researchers to have access to do experiments in space?

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