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Fluidic Telescope Sounds Like Something Out of Terminator, NASA Seriously Considering It

Space-based telescopes have been around for a while now, but only in recent years, after the things that were uncovered came into the spotlight with greater focus, did most of us humans begin to understand just how important they are for space exploration. Oh, and thanks to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, of course.
FLUTE telescope concept 14 photos
Photo: Edward Balaban
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Having such a piece of hardware in space allows scientists here on Earth to look at the Universe and back in time without interference from the planet’s atmosphere, human activity, and natural phenomena. They can also see further in space and time and uncover things that would otherwise have remained hidden.

But as our world’s goals expand, so does our need to see and learn more, more, more. We’re no longer just staring at the sky wondering what’s there, but we’re actively on the hunt to learn how stars and solar systems were born, and detect as many alien planets as we can in a bid to answer a question that has been nagging us for a very long time: is there intelligent life out there?

Since we’re not yet at a point when we can build spaceships and go out looking for an answer, we’ll need to stick to telescopes, but ones significantly larger than what we currently have available – the James Webb, for instance, relies on a 6.5 meters (21.6 feet) mirror for data.

Making space telescopes bigger in turn means more money, bigger dangers, and a whole lot of other challenges. There’s a general consensus that going for aperture sizes beyond 10 meters (33 feet) isn’t sustainable financially, although exact cost calculations have not been made.

Yet here is someone advancing the idea of a 50-meter (164-feet) space observatory, built not in the traditional way here on Earth, but by creating the thing’s mirror in space, using fluidic shaping – meaning using fluids that can later be solidified into the desired shape.

That someone would be NASA Ames Research Center’s Edward Balaban, who, earlier this month, was announced as the recipient of a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program Phase I grant for his idea.

Balaban calls the project FLUTE, or Fluidic Telescope, and it comes as a tool with an unsegmented primary mirror that can be used for a variety of tasks. The crazy idea about it is that it’ll be cast (we’ll call the process that for lack of a better word) right on location with sub-nanometer surface quality.

Now, we’ve featured NIAC projects before here on autoevolution, and we’re yet to see a single one actually moving to production stage, but the fact NASA backed this idea is proof there might be some merit to it.

The researcher behind FLUTE plans to use the NIAC funds (a total of $175,000 were awarded this month to 14 ideas) to look into what components such a telescope would need to use, come up with the mission concept and even create a subscale prototype that could be tested in low-Earth orbit.
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Editor's note: Gallery shows various telescopes and images they returned.

About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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