I’ve been thinking for the past few days about Hubble’s future.
And also about the abandoned TAU Project. TAU stood for Thousands of Astronomical Units. It was intended as a way to get a telescope up above the galactic plane, and over the dust in that plane to get a direct optical view of the center of the galaxy.
See where I’m going with this?
We have a perfectly good (indeed, OUTSTANDING!) telescope already in space. A few modifications, remove the solar panels, replace them with deep space SNAP generators. Add an ion drive rocket, a bigger data transceiver, and a few other odds and sods. Orient the telescope to roughly the galactic plane and very slowly spin it like a bottle so that it pans the entire galaxy say once a day (week or month).
Visualize this as the telescope being the top bar of a ‘T’ (or tau) with the enhanced data link, ion engine, and such forming the stem of the ‘T’.
At a very modest 0.01g acceleration, it would be 10,000 AU above the galactic plane in 5 1/2 years.
We’d have clear photos, clear optical photos of the galactic core. We’d have millions of images of our local neighborhood, and a very long baseline for exactly calibrating distances to stars in our own galaxy.
We’d be able to actually see the other arms of our galaxy! Right now we’re stuck down in the smog, and like a mid 70s Angelino, we can’t even see the local mountains! (execept they had occasional clear days!)
Getting to the Hubble is a it of a problem ...