Phased Array Optics

It’s now been over 15 years since cryonics pioneer, molecular nanotechnologist, and optics buff Dr. Brian Wowk came up with the super-cool idea of phased array optics. Essentially, the plan is to use a 2D array of micron-sized screens to emit light at the precise amplitude and phase necessary to create the illusion of a 3D image. This technology could be fantastically effective: even using binoculars or a telescope, a person looking at the screen would be able to see details “km away” (if the image were high enough resolution) even if the screen were right in front of their face. Outside of tapping into the optic nerve directly, this may be the most convincing display technology ever. The limits of optics. The only problem is that it would require a metric truckload of computing power, but it’s nothing that specialty nanocomputers won’t be able to handle, right? Here is a diagram of the apparatus:

2008-06-03: GLIMPSE

GLIMPSE (Galactic Legacy Infrared Midplane Extraordinaire) is a survey of the inner part of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we reside. The images come from the IRAC instrument on board the Spitzer Space Telescope. These surveys have 100x the sensitivity and over 10x the resolution of previous surveys, allowing us to see stars and dusty objects throughout most of the Galaxy for the first time.

2008-09-19: Space flux telescopes

Holding the mirror pieces together magnetically seems the only practical way to reach the 40m+ diameter required to detect extrasolar planets directly
2009-06-11: The new refraction limit is wavelength / 20, a 10x improvement. This allows imagining of molecules with optical microscopes, and maybe also improvements for telescopes.
2013-12-09: DARPA MOIRE. The thickness of plastic wrap, each membrane serves as a Fresnel lens, which unfold in orbit. The diameter of 20 m would be the largest telescope ever made and gives it ~30x the light-gathering power of the HST.

2015-09-01: 3.2 Gigapixel

The US Department of Energy has approved the start of construction for a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera—the world’s largest—at the heart of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Assembled at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the camera will be the eye of LSST, revealing unprecedented details of the universe and helping unravel some of its greatest mysteries.

2016-08-15: LUVOIR

The Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared Surveyor is a proposed space telescope that would be 5x as big and 100x as sensitive as the Hubble, with a 12m mirror, and would orbit the sun ~1.6m km from Earth. The revolutionary HDST space-based observatory would have the capability to find and study 10s of Earth-like worlds in detail. The 10 milliarcsec resolution element of a 12 meter telescope (diffraction limited at 0.5 micron) would reach a new threshold in spatial resolution. It would be able to take an optical image or spectrum at ~100 parsec spatial resolution or better, for any observable object in the entire Universe. Thus, no matter where a galaxy lies within the cosmic horizon, we would resolve the scale at which the formation and evolution of galaxies becomes the study of their smallest constituent building blocks—their star-forming regions and dwarf satellites. Within the Milky Way, a 12 m telescope would resolve the distance between the Earth and the Sun for any star in the Solar neighborhood, and resolve 100 AU anywhere in the Galaxy. Within our own Solar System, we would resolve structures the size of Manhattan out at the orbit of Jupiter

2017-04-08: Planet wide radio telescope

VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) now links radio telescopes spread across the globe into a telescope the size of our planet– extending the array to millimeter wavelengths achieved a further boost in resolving power. The result is a 10x increase in the sensitivity of the world’s millimeter VLBI networks.

2018-07-30: Adaptive optics Neptune

In astronomy, adaptive optics refers to a technique where instruments are able to compensate for the blurring effect caused by Earth’s atmosphere, which is a serious issue when it comes to ground-based telescopes. Basically, as light passes through our atmosphere, it becomes distorted and causes distant objects to become blurred (which is why stars appear to twinkle when seen with the naked eye).

2018-09-08: Imaging Oort Cloud objects

The most distant galaxies can be seen by our telescopes but smaller and closer objects in the Oort clouds cannot be seen. The Oort cloud objects are too faint to see with the James Webb Space Telescope, but it should be able to see bright galaxies and quasars even at 13B light years. Detecting Oort cloud dwarf planets would likely take a space telescope with an 11 kilometer mirror.

2019-03-21: Exoplanet Gigapixel Imaging

If we send a telescope to the solar gravitational lens (SGL) point on the opposite side of our sun then light from objects like exoplanets will be focused to provide 100B times more magnification. The Sun becomes a telescope that is 1.4M kilometers wide for the SGL regions.

We could resolve exoplanets around Proxima B to 450-meter resolution using a 1-meter telescope SGL mission. If there was an earth-sized planet around Proxima B, we could resolve to 800 megapixels. We would only be able to resolve 10 square kilometers at a time. The space telescope would have to roam around the einstein-ring image of the target object to assemble the full image. The image would need to be converted from an einstein ring back into the image of the exoplanet. A giant 1.3 kilometer focus line diameter space telescope would be able to resolve an entire einstein-ring image of an earth-sized exoplanet at 100 light years from the right SGL location.

2019-12-04: 1000km Space Telescopes

The 1000km baseline arrays would have over 400K times the light collection of the Hubble Space telescope.

2020-07-08: Gravity Lenses. If we send telescopes out to 4 light days we can use the gravity of the sun to amplify the power of telescopes by 100B times.
2021-05-14: Quantum Interferometry

A quantum hard drive at each telescope can record and store the wavelike states of incoming photons without disturbing them. After a while, you transport the hard drives to a single location, where you interfere the signals to create an incredibly high-resolution image. Not everyone thinks it’ll work. “In the long run, if these techniques are to become practical, they will require a quantum network”. Bartholomew counters that “we have good reasons to be optimistic” about quantum hard drives. “I think in a 5-to-10-year time frame you could see tentative experiments where you actually start looking at real [astronomical] sources.” By contrast, the construction of a quantum internet is decades from reality.

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