I love the name of that scope.

"CCDs on a very large flat surface", virtual mirror? You just made my brain explode.

LC

Am I understanding this right?

You will also argue that if the individual detectors know where they are at any given time, the flatness of the physical structure is not as critical.

And you'll make a sparse array too, no doubt.

So this is a bit like digital interferometry?

(Everything is interferometry, really – there was something in school about a wave front basically being equivalent to an infinite number of point source interfering with each other. I think this means that the CCDs will have to capture the phase information)

Disclaimer – It might very well be that I have no idea what the hell I am talking about. However, that has rarely stopped me before.. I'm a mechanical engineer, you see.

"@Astrofiend… Have mercy on your fellow astronomers… It might prove somewhat distracting to work in the same room with a burning limbless scientist t having continuous multiple orgasms."

I'll see if I can restrain myself…

What about stars that are closer than that?? It would be SO COOL to get direct observations of the Alpha Centauri system.

LC

Does anyone know if these guys making real progress?
http://www.tmt.org/timeline/index.html

TMT is not as large, but if it's on track, it gets dibbs on the "30 m highly segmented" class

Is that right? With the Keck Telescopes, the individual segments are what's called an active surface. They move the individual segments to keep the primary mirror in an optimal shape as they telescope points to different parts of the sky. This correction is done at a much lower frequency than the adaptive optics correction which is done tens to hundreds of times per second.

Adaptive optics is currently done by deforming a mirror farther along the optical path. The LBT uses a deformable secondary mirror and they have been having some trouble using such a large deformable mirror.

Does anyone know more details on the proposed AO system for the E-ELT?

I truly hope they can finish it before the end of the next decade.

Optical interferometers employ beam splitters and optical fiber. Optical interferometers are then precise optical bench systems. So optical interferometry involves precise phasing information and exact positioning information. Getting this from a range of scopes in orbit would be difficult in the extreme.

LC

"Is it possible that a telescope like this could be used in conjunction with a space based telescope like Hubble to get even better images of distant objects, like extra-solar planets?"

If you mean for interferometry, like commonly employed for radio telescopes and like they do by combining the light from the two Keck telescopes or the four VLT telescopes in Chile, then no – not with any currently available technology, nor any technology that would become available any time soon. To do optical interferometry, you need to combine the light from the different telescopes with path lengths equal to within a small fraction of the wavelength of the shortest wavelength of light you are interested in. So, say you want the full visible spectrum, that would be a small fraction of 400 nanometres. This has only very recently become achievable with stationary ground telescopes separated by no more than a few hundred metres. The Hubble, on the other hand, is wizzing around Earth much faster than a rifle bullet travels, in a roughly though not precisely circular orbit. Relative to the stationary EELT, it's motion would be even more complex. Not to mention slight perturbations to it's orbit due to small gravitational anomalies that would become important at this level of required precision. There is simply no physical way to combine the beams from these telescopes for interferometry, or to record the observations and correlate the signals later on for optical wavelengths.

LC

I wonder what behemoths they are going to be pointing around in 100 years? Damn you relatively short life span!