Giant Space Telescopes Could Be Made Out of Liquid

The Hubble space telescope has a primary mirror of 2.4 meters. The Nancy Grace Roman telescope has one at 2.4 meters and the James Webb Space Telescope has a whopping 6.5 meter primary mirror. These are all fine and well to get the job done that they were designed for, but what if… we could have even bigger mirrors?

The larger the mirror, the more light is collected. This means that we can see farther back in time with bigger mirrors to observe star and galaxy formation, image exoplanets directly, and to work out just what dark matter is.

But the process for creating a mirror is involved and takes time. There is casting the mirror blank to get the basic shape. Then you have to toughen the glass by heating and slow cooling. Grinding the glass down and polishing it into its perfect shape comes next followed by testing and coating the lens. This isn’t so bad for smaller lenses, but we want bigger. Much bigger.

Enter the idea for using fluids to create lenses in space that are 10x – 100x bigger. And the time it would take to make them would be significantly less than a glass-based lens.

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We’re About to Find Out How Well Biomining Works in Space

Mining is traditionally thought of as an activity that utilizes picks and shovels, or in more modern times, huge machines that can tear apart entire mountainsides in minutes.  Industrial might isn’t the only way to rip apart rock though.  A scalable and much more environmentally friendly way to access the materials mining seeks to extract is to use microbes.  Such techniques are already widely used in terrestrial mining operations.  But recently, a team led by the University of Edinburgh have launched an asteroid mining experiment using microbes on the International Space Station (ISS).

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