The Terrascope: Using Earth as a lens for a revolutionary telescope

[Forerunner]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...e-a-lens-for-a-revolutionary-space-telescope/

Stationed beyond the moon, the proposed "terrascope" would use our planet's atmosphere to magnify light from distant objects.

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Now a new preprint study suggests that far from being a bane, Earth's atmosphere could become astronomy's boon, serving to amplify starlight in ways that reduce the need for enormous (and enormously expensive) telescopes on the ground and in space. Astronomers badly need such money-saving, performance-boosting approaches as the cost of building new state-of-the-art observatories soars to unsustainable levels.

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The key to all this would be atmospheric refraction, which is the way light bends as it enters Earth's atmosphere from space—a phenomenon you might know best as the cause of our planet's colorful sunsets. In certain situations, refraction can focus a huge amount of light on a small area, erasing the need for a giant structure to catch it all. In particular, light from far-off sources can refract through the upper atmosphere to form a cone around Earth, projecting rays that come together at a point slightly closer than the moon and then extend outward in a straight line.

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[Sander VF]

Does this count as a megastructure?

 

[Captain Tuttle]

That's incredible if they can overcome the obstacles

 

[Temp_User]

I have a new favourite word(s): atmospheric lensing.

 

[WeAreStarStuff]

Incredible.

 

[Pomerlaw]

Wow

 

[Palette Swap]

It's kind of like that time we used the sun as a radio signal amplifier. That sure ended well.

Does this count as a megastructure?

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That's definitely megascale engineering (I love that there's a Wikipedia article about it).

 

[behOemoth]

It's kind of like that time we used the sun as a radio signal amplifier. That sure ended well.


That's definitely megascale engineering (I love that there's a Wikipedia article about it).

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I recall having fusion, VR MMOs and space elevators.

 

[Sander VF]

It's kind of like that time we used the sun as a radio signal amplifier. That sure ended well.


That's definitely megascale engineering (I love that there's a Wikipedia article about it).

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Megastructures are some of the coolest futurist stuff.

It's also kind of amusing that you could do astounding things with with relatively mundane things if you could build them on a large enough scale in space. For example, with mirrors and shades you could control a planet's climate at will, even on a localized scale and achieve feats such as preventing hurricanes from forming (or maybe even spawning them for whatever reason).

If anyone here has any interest in this kind of stuff, please do check Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel. He covers some crazy shit.

 

[Forerunner]

The more I think about this, I'm just amazed. It's such a simple concept, but it is genius. Before this there was the notion of using the Sun, however, for that to work the satellite would have to be 550 AU away and with our current tech, it would take 100 years to reach that distance. So, that's not feasible. However, by using Earth it is entirely in the realm of possibilities. We could get large Earth size images of planets out to 100 light years. We could actually make out topographical features of planets not even in our solar system.

This is actually mind boggling if it works. We would learn so much, so fast.