Turning Earth Into a Telescope - The Terrascope:

Not to bump, but am I crazy for being really excited about this concept? It is described as allowing transformative science with even a 1 meter telescope, and NASA still has a bigger ex-military camera like the one in Nancy Grace Roman sitting around somewhere. I'm not sure if it's capable of such a mission, but it's the only idea I can think of that's even cooler than using it in a Mars reconnaissance/mapping satellite. Either way, I think that even a 1 meter telescope proving such an incredible technique could encourage the funding for say, a 6-8 -meter telescope, which would seem to represent a revolutionary capacity... If anyone's at all familiar with the technical challenges of this mission, I'd love to know more.
 
I wonder what the relative performance of other orbital bodies would be? Upper atmospheres of Venus, Gas Giants, Titan etc.
 
Paul Gilster space blog had a couple entries back in the day
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2019/08/13/the-terrascope-challenges-going-forward/
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2019/08/12/planetary-lensing-enter-the-terrascope/

Those with a long memory may recall my Centauri Dreams articles on Claudio Maccone’s FOCAL ideas in relation to creating not just a telescope but a radio bridge between distant targets for interstellar exploration [see, for example, The Gravitational Lens and Communications]. Could we do something similar to create a radio Terrascope? The paper gives a nod to the notion, and I asked Kipping if he could expand upon the idea, which he was kind enough to do yesterday.

“Any system like this can also be used in reverse, we can switch out the detector for a transmitter and suddenly we have an antenna with an amplification of 45,000 instead,” he wrote in an email. “In fact, it’s even easier because you don’t need an Earth-shade anymore. To realize this in the radio, there would need to be some further work on how the ionosphere affects the lensing but certainly the optical and infrared are already viable according to my study. One could imagine using this as the bedrock for an interplanetary high speed internet, enabling missions like Cassini and Juno to send back very high fidelity data.”
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

This has such "3 bodies problem" vibes, when in the first book the Sun is turned into a powerful emitter.
 

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