I’m still waiting for someone to rerun the math for the KIC 9832227 collision.
The data went dark. All of a sudden it was “Ooops, never mind, nothing to see here just move along.”
Perhaps objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
I’ve been thinking 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, upgraded gyros, and a few other odds and sods. Either fully gimbal mount, or yoke mount it to orient the telescope to roughly the galactic plane and very slowly spin the entire assembly like a bottle so that the telescope itself periodically pans the entire galaxy (daily, weekly, monthly?).
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! (except they had occasional clear days!)
*we use those "known" distances to estimate distances to distant stars with the same characteristics...