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Anonymous
>>149669 see the second link
"NIAC director Bob Cassanova agrees. 'It's quite feasible,' he says. 'The debate about this is about some of the details.'
The biggest advantage is the relative low cost. Liquid telescopes cost 10 to 20 times less to build than polished aluminum mirrors of similar size, in part because they needn't be engineered to the same tolerances. And even the largest liquid mirrors don't require the sophisticated support structures that are needed to prevent solid ones from sagging under their own weight.
'The forces of nature conspire to give them the right shape,' Borra says.
Alas, the same low temperatures that would facilitate infrared observation would also turn mercury, the liquid used in terrestrial LMTs, into a solid. So the greatest technical challenge for Angel's team lies in finding reflective liquids with low freezing points and vapor pressures liquids that would neither freeze nor evaporate into space.
That task fell to Ermanno Borra, a physicist and liquid-mirror pioneer at Laval University in Quebec who first made the case for a lunar LMT in 1991. Recently, Borra has been experimenting with metal liquid-like films, or MELFFs, that reflect light as effectively as aluminum.
Borra declined to comment on his results until they've been published in the journal Nature later this summer. But his teammates were impressed. 'It looks very promising,' Hickson says."
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