Breaking News
Exposing the enablers
Great Coin Show, You Won't Believe What I Found!
"AI-ENGINEERED" THE NEXT THREAT TO AMERICAN AGRICULTURE
China Found Something Better Than Oil
Top Tech News
BEYOND THE MOON: NASA plans a nuclear-powered fleet to push DEEPER into space
Big Oil Backs Mazama's $135 Million Bet On Superhot Geothermal
Quantum compass takes flight on Northrop's Lumberjack drone
Terrifying AI Behavior Even Its Creators Couldn't Explain
WW3 Near-Miss? AI Hallucinated Nuclear Weapons Components Aboard Chinese Vessel Bound For Iran
Stripe Is Building the Toll Road for the Machine Economy
Toyota Dakar hopeful swaps twin-turbo V6 for hydrogen fuel cells
4-min turbo-inflatable cubic camp castle is now available in the USA
Researchers Used Claude To Hack OpenAI Employee Accounts
Chinese Scientists Develop New Oil Refining Method That Cuts Energy Use by 90%
Spinning Membrane Space Telescopes Would Be Big, Cheap and Easy
A demonstration cubesat EST could have an aperture larger than the Webb Space Telescope. The Webb Space Telescope has a 6.5-meter mirror and costs over $10 billion.
The EST employs a hoop to deploy a slack reflector membrane, such as solar sail material or radio dish. The EST is simultaneously rotated around its center and accelerated along its axis of rotation, the membrane will assume a parabolic shape, thereby creating a reflector for a very large aperture telescope. The EST reflector can be accelerated along its linear axis by tethering its deployment hoop to a tug spacecraft.
Linear acceleration will shape the telescope membrane into a parabola.
A little demonstration EST, with a total mass less than 20 kg, including optics that would be positioned along or suspended from the tether at the parabola focal point, would have four times the light gathering capacity of Webb (about thirty times that of Hubble), while costing on the order of 1/1000th as much.