We’ve come a long way when it comes to peering into the Universe, going from thinking that everything in our solar system revolved around the Earth to being able to find potentially habitable exo-planets orbiting around stars hundreds of light years away. We even just imaged a black hole for the first time and inch closer and closer to figuring out what Dark Matter is. However, we’ve still have a long way to go before we go actually detect life on any of those exo-planets or say with certainty how the Universe began or why it’s continuing to expand.
To help us answer those enduring questions that keep us up at night we need better tools. Highly sensitive, large-scale instruments that give us a level of clarity multiple factors above today’s standards. After all, we were only able to image that black hole by literally turning the entire Earth into a giant telescope thanks to a network of inter-connected satellites scattered across the globe. The new James Webb Telescope, Hubble’s replacement, is supposed to help with that. It’s supposedly powerful enough to spot a single firefly millions of miles away. But even that isn’t good enough.
No, what we need. What we really need is a way to escape Earth all together. A way to build a massive telescope in space where size limitations won’t matter. Telescopes so large that they’ll be able to see just about anything. Even image the surface of distant planets.
And soon we may have a way to do just that.
As Wired puts it:
“If we ever have giant inflatable telescopes in space, you can thank Chris Walker’s mom. Years ago, Walker was making chocolate pudding when he had to interrupt his culinary undertaking to field a phone call from his mother. He took the pudding off the stovetop, covered it with plastic wrap, and placed the pot on the floor by his couch. When the call was finished, he was startled to find an image of a light bulb from a nearby lamp hovering over the end of the couch. When he investigated the cause of this apparition, he found that a pocket of cold air formed as the pudding cooled, and that had caused the center of the plastic wrap to sag toward the pudding. This, in effect, formed a lens that was reflecting the light bulb.
“I thought ‘Hey, this is cool, but I have no use for it now,’” Walker, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, says. But 30 years later, he used it as the basis for a proposal he sent to NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, a program that funds far-out aerospace ideas.
The subject of that proposal was essentially a way to turn a giant inflatable beach ball into a space telescope. This suborbital balloon reflector wouldn’t contend with as much atmospheric interference as ground-based instruments. Furthermore, it could be easily scaled up, opening vast swaths of the universe to observation without the hefty price tag associated with building large telescopes.”
Personally, I love this idea. Installing huge telescopes in space is an idea that I’ve long held. I just didn’t know how to actually plan out the logistics to make it happen. But thanks to Chris Walker and his mom now we do. Secrets of the Universe here we come!
Are giant inflatable telescopes the Greatest Idea Ever?
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