Aperture synthesis using orbiting telescopes

A study was carried out to determine the feasibility, with current technology, of performing aperture synthesis using two telescopes orbiting the earth in coordinated orbits separated by approximately 10 m to 1 km. The objective was to determine whether there is a practical alternative to a very large, deployed, servo-controlled submillimeter telescope (i.e., the Large Deployable Reflector) for obtaining high-resolution submillimeter images of astronomical sources. It is found that suitable classes of orbits exist which can provide good UV coverage over the entire sky and the real-time correlation of wideband signals can be performed in orbit using current technology. The most difficult task appears to be the real-time determination of the orientation of the baseline vector in a stable coordinate system. A plausible scheme has been identified for the determination of an arbitrary direction to within 0.003 arcsec in an astrometric coordinate system. This scheme not only makes submillimeter interferometric image reconstruction possible but should also have numerous other applications.