this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Astronomy
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You would be hard pushed to build something like the SKA in space given it spans multiple countries and a significant arc of the earth.
Imagine one orbiting each planet and what we can observe.
I can imagine it but it certainly won't be practical to implement in our lifetimes. There are certainly some observatories that benefit from being based in space (optical and infrared) and even gravitational detectors such as laser interferometers. However aside from the wide capture area radio telescopes need large amounts of compute to separate the signal from the noise. The amount of data that needs to be processed makes space based radio observatories very hard to implement.
Maybe the dark side of the moon will make a decent observatory one day but we haven't set foot on the place for decades, let alone built anything so complex.