When they say they're going to make a cross-continental array of telescopes, they don't mean they're going to build all the telescopes, but simply link together a number of existing telescopes, to get them all to point at the same thing at the same time, and share data that can be recombined into a very high resolution image.
It's a technique called Very Long Basline Interferometry, and it's been used before, although mostly with radio astronomy, because with that kind of work, you need to have precision in your measurements on the order of the wavelength of the signal you're looking at. In the radio bands, that's a few meters. In sub-millimeter observations, that's, well... less than a millimeter. So really this is more a tet of their measurement precision and ability to coordinate telescopes across the globe, not any kind of massive construction undertaking.
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Date: 2005-10-03 05:20 pm (UTC)It's a technique called Very Long Basline Interferometry, and it's been used before, although mostly with radio astronomy, because with that kind of work, you need to have precision in your measurements on the order of the wavelength of the signal you're looking at. In the radio bands, that's a few meters. In sub-millimeter observations, that's, well... less than a millimeter. So really this is more a tet of their measurement precision and ability to coordinate telescopes across the globe, not any kind of massive construction undertaking.
It is still pretty darn cool.