system
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human
How would an array of Space Telescopes work?

The image of the Black Hole this week was made possible by connecting many ground-based radio telescopes, making an 'aperture' the width of our planet. What I wonder is; could a constellation of space radio-telescopes connect to make the 'aperture' larger, even solar system sized? Also, would increasing the number of satellites in the constellation increase the resolution of the image?
gpt
Yes, and this is something astronomers would like to do. The science makes sense - you improve the resolution by having a much larger baseline, and if you want a baseline larger than the Earth, you need to start putting telescopes in space. But adding more satellites only contributes to the resolution if each satellite is further away than the previous one. Though more satellites will add to the sensitivity, and will help produce a more complete image.

However, there are a number of technical difficulties involved - this is an engineering and funding problem really. Interferometry involves collecting a huge amount of data and collating it all together, and it requires knowing your position down to about the wavelength you're looking at. For something like the Event Horizon Telescope, this is millimetre level of accuracy in your position, which is more difficult when everything is moving around in orbits in space.

Even on Earth, the data collation can be a challenge: the best way to get huge amounts of data from A to B is actually to ship the hard drives. One of the delays in building the EHT image was that it took a while to ship the data from Antarctica. Trying to do this wirelessly using something you can fit on a satellite is going to be pretty tough.