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Let's first give this spacecraft a ridiculous name, 'Mars Multiple Electromagnetic Radio Konsideration and Transmitter' or
Meerkat Array for short.
Have any serious proposals existed for Spotlights or Telescopes at Mars, this telescope would transmit a Mars-Asteroid-Mars reflection an Asteroid laser uv and radio communications technique depending on reflection / propagation. After hitting an object Information would be returned from the Asteroid or twin meteor bodies via reflection from the surface of and then back to a Mars-based receiver either a fleet on Ears in orbit or Ears on the ground, data would be processed and finally sent back to Earth by managing some message system. The lower the frequency the less loss or attenuation with distance decreases but at certain wavelengths reflection might be increasingly rough with signals getting dispersed and diffuse due to the material of the Asteroid, reflections observed on Mars would have polarization and doppler offset. The air of Mars has its own properties so certain frequencies could refract from the ionosphere depending on the location, the time of day on Mars and altitude. The inverse square if radiationstates that the intensity of radiation from a point source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance meaning that the radiation returned gets smaller the farther away it is from source, if the distance is doubled, the intensity is reduced by a factor of four. With Light an object of the same size twice as far away receives only one-quarter the energy in the same time period and using the same Law so radar will receive energy according to the inverse fourth power of the range.
This telescope would placed at the Second Mars L2 Lagrange point looking away from Mars, Earth and the Sun into the direction of Deep Space, the search beam would be like a laser and be Nuclear powered and beam energy, it would be part of a fleet searching mapping the Asteroid Belt and searching for Potentially Hazardous Asteroids. Having Ears behind the main pulsing spotlight telescope listening for multiple signals would allow maximum resolution for the listening telescope seeing reflections from the pulses, Reflections would be poor and the Irradiance follows the Inverse square law. The telescope search beam would pulse 4-5 times so the fleet of ears would have correct readings and there would be no confusion of random 'hot pixels'. The power for light, laser, radio or uv source might be a beam measured in Megawatts, only a fraction of a percent of energy is returned from a celestial object but NASA already sends and receives radio signals from objects as far away as the Voyager 2 spacecraft and Boeing already has a large device with interaction of multiple lasers for use aboard the iodine Airborne Laser.
Every time the main telescope search beam would pulse electro magnetic radiation there would be a dead time for the ears behind to listen, the pulse would be only thousandths of a second but the pulse would be repeated a number of times, it might also push light or heat or laser and uv, there might be a warm up time or cool down time for the dish, light blub or uv transmitter. To concentrate the radio burst of energy you might design a type of Yagi a long boom with reflector, the might be an Artificial Intelligence Communication management system for spotlight and ears, it might also transmit in the 6-15 GHz range it could be many meters or feet long or take many hours for the final signals to travel from Mars to the Comet / Asteroids and back to Mars and then from the spacecraft to Earth. Higher angular resolutions for telescopes flying behind and listening and seeing the reflection is achieved by a laser guided formation of arrays of telescopes perhaps controlled by AI. The main telescope searching would be a spot light and beam energy in the microwave 2-3 GHz, infrared, visible, and x-ray the round trip of the signal may have a round trip delay of about 5 minutes. The 'Ears' would always listen in the direction of the pulse and be an array of telescope satellites flying in formation behind the electro magnetic spot light, they might fly behind the main satellite in a Diamond shape or Soccer Pitch or maybe a NFL sized football field. They would look exactly parallel in the direction the lead satellite beams its energy, when they satellite picks a new target they would already be maneuvered in place and look at where the Spotlight Satellite is shining its 'beam' the satellites flying behind in formation are listening for reflections, any readings of echos increased and transmitted to a site on Mars or Earth by the high power amplifier, during the quiet dead time the Ears as listening and recording. The beam might be tested on already known objects in the Asteroid Belt, or Jupiter Trojans or the inner main asteroid belt such as Dinkinesh and its satellite Selam. Flying behind the sport flight maybe a dozens of meter sized or hundreds of feet sized self assembled antenna.
Some people on Earth might complain Mars was engaging in 'Active SETI' by beaming such a spotlight into space.
The mission would not be so different from the long ago cancelled Terrestrial Planet Finder the cosmic astronomical interferometer or space telescopes flying as an array. A Radio Array flying behind listening for pulses will have higher picture resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope and see picture resolution less than hundredths of an arcsecond. The Ears Seeing Reflections might self assemble and unfold just as Mars Rovers have unfolded or Telescopes like JWST packed in tightly like an Origami shape.
Because ESA and NASA considered a fleet of telescopes like 'TPF' to be possible it seems one could possibly build arrays of infrared, micorwave or visible light telescope? the overall resolution is improved by having a much larger baseline. A large number of telescopes used in a networked formation could give a picture produced which has resolution similar to a single telescope with the diameter of the combined spread of telescopes, other Earth examples are VLT Interferometer managed by European Observatory in Chile and the the Keck Interferometer in Chile, they also improve problems with seeing from the ground by way of adaptive optics, gamma ray detection has also been done by the Cherenkov Telescope Array. Arecibo L-band Feed Array scanned more than one pixel, it allowed detect radio signals from 7 points on the sky simultaneously and not just one single pixel, the long wavelengths of radio are not like IR or visible spectrum and radio scopes can stay on the ground are not susceptible to this absorbtion.
http://egg.astro.cornell.edu/alfalfa/ugrad/alfa.htm
TPF ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
https://web.archive.org/web/20041020012 … _index.cfm
From the 50,000 meteorites found on Earth it was found that 99.8 percent are believed to have originated in the asteroid belt. A Mars spotlight with ears flying behind would not only protect Earth from hazzards but it would warn Mars Colonists of Future Asteroids that are Potentially Dangerous and other 'Near Mars Objects'. The asteroid belt is better studied from Mars since it is a region of the Solar System between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070515163 … teroid.htm
The Air of Mars has different absorption in the visual, infrared and radio when compared with the Atmosphere of Earth and its Radio and Optical properties so it is possible an Array of Seeing or Listening Devices would also be placed on the ground on Mars. However Telescopes on the ground would face their own problems like 'Dust' and the Absorption of the Mars Atmosphere would change during a Dust Storm.
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2023-11-28 15:56:22)
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There have also been ideas to use the Mountains of Mars as Observation sites just as Mountains are used on Earth
some ground stations might be 3-d printed
It is not unusual for Observatories or a Telescope to scan more than one spectrum, the Hubble has been observing visible and near-infrared light, Hubble also detects ultraviolet light
Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/11105/chapter/1
Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an intergovernmental international radio telescope project being built in Australia (low-frequency) and South Africa (mid-frequency
Olympus Mons: The largest volcano in the solar system
https://www.space.com/20133-olympus-mon … -mars.html
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2023-11-28 13:05:06)
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Mission to Put a Radio Telescope on The Moon Planned to Launch in 2025
https://www.sciencealert.com/mission-to … ch-in-2025
Merging Galaxies from Hubble
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231024.html
There are unexplored regions of the universe—and there are also unexplored times. In fact, there's a nearly 400-million-year gap in our universe's history that we've never seen: a time before stars known as the Dark Ages. To investigate that era, researchers want to pick up a particular radio signal that can't be measured from Earth.
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-radio-side-moon.html
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