NASA's six-mile-wide orbital telescope is 1/6th built NASA has plans to build a telescope six miles (9.66km) wide in Earth orbit, comprised of a constellation of six toaster-sized satellites. The first of those toasters has just been finished. The Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, or SunRISE, will keep a close eye on our local star to help scientists gain a better …
the same principle as the Event Horizon Telescope NASA scientists used to photograph the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
"The six "SmallSats" will orbit Earth approximately 22,000 miles (35,405.568km) away in a circular formation."
That Km conversion is remarkably precise for an approximation but can we have it in the Internationally recognised units, please? For reference - and to save on keystrokes for the update - it's about 252,902,632 Linquine. For readers in the Southern Hemisphere who prefer a more local equivalent, fractionally under 5,807,909 Giraffes.
/coat
One meter difference does make optical interferometry quite unusable. Maybe they cut off some extra digits up to the nanometer scales to prevent us from getting too confused?
But then, the "approximately 22,000 miles" statement. I guess they are approximating interferometry on the mile boundaries. They must be listening in on the very low frequency AM transmissions coming from beyond the sun.
You do know that the sun's core is a gateway to another dimension, don't you? From there the aliens have been sending transmissions at low frequency. And surely, that we must pick up to join the intergalactic community. Rumours have it that the transmission contains the intergalactic community registration form.
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They're listening in the 0.1 to 25 MHz range, roughly 3km to 10m wavelength if my mental arithmetic is OK. The ionosphere normally blocks everything below 15 MHz, so this is virgin territory, I suppose.
(I didn't find that terribly easy to look up. The NASA page for the mission didn't want to say and there is a UV solar telescope launch on a balloon that is also called "sunrise" which makes googling harder.)
If this constellation of SmallSats is in orbit around Earth at 22,000 miles and according to the article:
"SunRISE's SmallSats will connect together to act as a single antenna used to detect radio wave bursts that indicate a solar event that could have an impact on human space activities."
then I very much doubt that an event that happens 93m miles away and the light from which takes 8 1/3 minutes to get to Earth, so having this telescope so close (at 0.000236559 of the Sun-Earth distance away, will give scientists about ~0.0002 * 8.33 minutes = 0.0019 minutes of "warning" - about 0.11 of a second !!
Hardly useful ?
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