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j_not_j | 8 months ago

Wouldn't be worth the trouble to try.

Why, you ask?

How do you point it? Where do you point it?

You have a "telescope" with a field of view of one-planets worth of pixels. But the planet is in orbit, so it drifts away from the imaged field of view within minutes.

Meanwhile your sensor is travelling away from the "lens" so transverse velocity would be needed to track the orbit at a delta-v and direction that is unknowable. Unknowable, because you have to know where the planet is, within a radius, to put your "sensor" in the right place in the first place.

Imagine taking a straw, place it in a tree, walk away a few km and focus a telescope on the straw and hope to look through the straw to see an airplane flying past. You have the same set of unknowables.

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__MatrixMan__|8 months ago

I won't argue that it would be worth the effort, but it would be interesting to set something like that going and just keep scanning. A few years worth of data might turn up interesting things even if it wasn't particularly useful for finding those things a second time.