

ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone - andrewheins
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1458134548/arkyd-a-space-telescope-for-everyone-0

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lutorm
This seems mostly to be a PR gimmick. While it seems like a cool thing to do
"just because we can", there is no compelling advantage to putting a 200mm
telescope in space. You don't get much sharper images by being in space with
such a small aperture. And launching a space telescope for people to take
pictures of themselves... I don't even know where to start.

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zacharycohn
The compelling advantage is that they're making it available to the public to
use.

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lutorm
But what I'm saying is the public can just get a 200mm telescope on the ground
themselves. No need to launch it into space.

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brianobush
I live in Portland, Oregon. Every time we wanted to use a telescope to see
some planetary wonder it has been cloudy. Hard to keep my kids excited about
space without seeing much of it :)

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mapt
You can rent time on a telescope in another hemisphere and timezone right now,
over the Internet.

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ramidarigaz
Probably the most awesome Kickstarter I've ever backed. I'm so excited!!!
Planetary Resources is a really cool company.

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simondlr
I'm unreasonably excited about it. For $25 I get to have a picture of my
choosing taken in space!

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mariusz79
At $25 per picture there must be 40 000 people as excited as you for this
project to get funded. I just don't see how is that going to be even remotely
possible.

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incision
_> At $25 per picture there must be 40 000 people as excited as you for this
project to get funded._

Not really.

Take away all the backers over $1000 (because I notice you complaining about
that in another post), scale up the number of backers for every <$1000 level
proportionally to reach $1M and it would only take 16,500 people.

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mariusz79
I think they are just running a really cool scam. First of all why do they
care if public is interested in space? Aren't they after all, looking to run a
successful and profitable business? Second, don't they have investors that
could sponsor this Arkyd Telescope and launch it without need for a
Kickstarter. What if for some reason the kickstarter campaign doesn't work?
What if they can't deliver? Are they willing to risk everything just to get
1mln$? Unless they are already out of money.

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zacharycohn
Disclaimer: I'm at the launch event and helped put this project together.

They're not doing this for the Kickstarter money. Even though they're
fundraising for the project, they're already putting in more than they could
ever hope to raise on Kickstarter.

This project is adjacent to their core mission of Asteroid Mining, this is to
prove interest that the public is interested in this sort of project, and to
give the public access to the sort of thing that was, previously, impossibly
expensive.

For $25 you can get a picture of yourself in space. That's pretty crazy.

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danielweber
Can you give us a rough sense of scale of how the $1 million from the
KickStarter compares to the other costs required to bring to completion 1)
everything promised in the KickStarter, and 2) their first satellite in space
capable of scoping out NEOs?

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zacharycohn
The $1M isn't going toward the cost of the satellite - they're already
building those for their primary mission.

This is to pay for the launch of an extra one, that has little to do with
their core mission of asteroid prospecting, and everything to do with
inspiring and educating.

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benzofuran
I could be talking out of my ass here, but with the amount of money that's
been pumped into PR (> $1B USD IIRC) by its big-name founders, why do they
need to do this? Satellites are cool and all, but everything I see out of them
is just "YOU GET INVOLVED" and "SOCIAL" - and not much on "How do we capture
and capitalize on mineral resources in space?"

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VLM
If this works, the amsat.org people should kickstart a fundraiser to get the
legendary geosync sat up there. I'd be happy just with AO-40 redux, or a fleet
of FM ez sats. Or maybe the mythical mars sat.

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omegant
Honest question: Could you explain a bit more this topic? I don´t even know
how to google it beyond geosync satellite.

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davidcuddeback
AmSat [1] is an organization of ham radio enthusiasts that are also very
interested in space and satellites. They've launched a bunch of their own
satellites into space that are available for anyone with a ham license to use
to communicate. These satellites are usually named /^AO-\d+$/. That's what the
AO-40 reference is to.

I don't know anything about the geosync or Mars sats that the GP is
referencing. I'm assuming those were proposed AmSat projects that have never
been launched.

Edited to add: A ham license is easy (and cheap) to get. I studied for a few
hours and paid about $10 at a local testing facility to get my license
(KI6BJU). The equipment is a bit more expensive, but I'm not sure how much it
costs for a decent setup because I worked in a lab that already had the
equipment.

Once you have a license and equipment, you can talk to other people over the
AO-sats and download pictures from scientific satellites. I got my license
when I worked in a satellite lab, and we used the equipment to download
weather photos from NOAA satellites and helped gather data from other
scientific satellites like NASA and various aerospace companies and
universities. A lot of satellites have some sort of beacon with a public data
format that you can decode.

[1] <http://ww2.amsat.org/>

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omegant
could some 100s of those small telescopes be used with interferometry to get a
better picture?

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mapt
Optical band sensors are not fast and low-noise enough, by several orders of
magnitude, to do the sort of digital interferometry available with radio
telescopes. Optical interferometers so far require optical correlators. This
geometric rather than data-analytical approach mandates knowing and
controlling the delay distances between the beams of light down to the
nanometer. Combined with adaptive optics, this is some of the highest
resolution imagery we can produce; But it is extremely limited because of the
practical difficulties of these hardware concerns, even in a situation where
there is a massive underground lab connecting the telescopes like at the VLT.
Satellites floating in free space on opposite sites of the Earth affected by
differential atmospheric drag, geomagnetic and heliomagnetic effects, and even
relativistic differences would present what appears to be an intractable
problem for this technology.

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omegant
What about some kind of periodical signal with known timing and fase that
could be used to calibrate and syncronise the signals at post processing?
Something like a film clapping board, but in space.

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mapt
Several orders of magnitude too slow sensors to discern that signal, again; to
say nothing of actually controlling the spacecraft's distance. The periodical
signals you mention would be just fine for discerning the position of radio
interferometry nodes because it's a lot less of a technical challenge and
because we can afford to do a few days of computational work for a given
millisecond of data, but not at the nanometer & femtosecond scale of precision
in _real time_ at low latency.

The difference between radio and optical-infrared regions of the EM spectrum
is not just about what the human eye can see, it's a fundamental difference in
how we measure - the former allows us to directly sense the shape of the EM
waves as they come in, while the latter is much higher resolution, but forces
us to indirectly make conjectures based upon how much energy was deposited
onto some specialized sensor in a macro-scale time period.

Here's what Wikipedia says about the boundary region between the two bands,
which is poorly studied because neither paradigm works well: "Terahertz
radiation occupies a middle ground between microwaves and infrared light
waves, and technology for generating and manipulating it is in its infancy,
and is a subject of active research. It represents the region in the
electromagnetic spectrum that the frequency of electromagnetic radiation
becomes too high to be measured by directly counting cycles using electronic
counters, and must be measured by the proxy properties of wavelength and
energy. Similarly, in this frequency range the generation and modulation of
coherent electromagnetic signals ceases to be possible by the conventional
electronic devices used to generate radio waves and microwaves, and requires
new devices and techniques."

The type of precision required here is well out of the reach of normal
engineering, it requires specialized tools like diffraction interference
wavefront sensors _just to make sure the shape of the mirror_ is precise
enough. That we've gotten it working at all with multi-focal optical systems
(for very bright stars, at least) is a bit of a miracle, and some of the
techniques required certainly involve the type of signal you're talking about
just to get it operating in the lab. Measuring distance with this kind of
resolution is just not something we have to do often, especially for very
large distances.

The next step in optical interferometry is _certainly_ not this kind of
solution, it's building a space interferometer with a normal real-time optical
correlator, as a single structural satellite, 2 mirrors on opposite ends of an
enclosed truss. A project modeled on that principle with 2x 50cm mirrors has
been a bridge too far for us, delayed and cancelled with NASA budget cuts:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Interferometry_Mission>

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omegant
Amazing reply, thank you very much! This is an awesome physics unexplored
field (maybe not unexplored, but yet with lots of stuff to learn) How cool
would be a kind of antenna that is able perform the same function as a mirror
but in an electronic way and not in a visual one.

