Researchers suggest an ion engine could get a telescope to the Solar Gravitational Len point 81 billion kms from Earth in 13 years, and thus allow high resolution imaging of nearby exoplanets. - eviltoast
  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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    10 days ago

    You wouldn’t put that much investment into a single picture. The limitation would be the time it takes to shift position. If the tech could be made at a reasonable cost, the best solution would be multiple crafts at various locations. 360 to cover each degree seen from the plane of the system. That single degree would still take a long time to move around in, but the orbit easy to maintain at about 1.3 km/second. That’s a long way out there.

    Edit: fixed the orbital velocity because I can’t read.

    • LostXOR@fedia.io
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      10 days ago

      2 m/s? Shouldn’t it be more on the order of 1.3 km/s with an 81 Tm orbital radius?

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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        10 days ago

        Yes. Always check your units, particularly what the calculator you pull up is using for the center body (Earth in my case). And a side note on that difference, it’s amazing that the velocity for an orbit that far out is still fast. Even with gravity falling off proportionally, even our little sun pulls hard.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        10 days ago

        Yep. 101% of statistics on the internet are made up, I guess.

        Maybe OP mixed up the unit? And, in any case, it would take a lot more in delta-V just to get there.