Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Right, Larry, we can't do it on orbit

A NEO search facility on the moon is a dumb idea, Ed
Larry J — (archived)

There's really no other word to describe it but dumb. Between the decades it'd take to get them built (one would be inadequate for a whole sky search due to obscura problems) and the untold billions it'd cost to build (that stand very little chance of every being allocated), it's just a bad, dumb idea. It's too bad you're blinded by your obscession and can't see the obvious.

Satellites don't have to have a lot of onboard processing to do the job. The radiation hardened computers on the Hubble, the ISS, or the Space Shuttle pale in power compared to an average desktop PC but all of those systems manage to function just fine. For the search satellites, your biggest processing needs are for pointing systems and that isn't a very big deal in term of CPU power. I'm looking into a ball turrent style folded optics design that would allow a hemispheric search without having to aim the satellite at all. That system, if practical, would allow for an easy to implement geosynch satellite design with ordinary off-the-shelf components for attitude control, propulsion, power, etc. It could even be built using an existing satellite bus like that of the GOES-Next series, on orbit in 2-3 years and under $150 million including launch costs. Try to match that with your lunar observatory fantasy.

XOR processing of overlapped images is very efficient if you want to do it on the satellite (transmitting only the deltas between images) but that isn't really necessary. You could easily perform a lossless compression algorithm like RLL and transmit the images to the ground for more precise analysis without losing a single bit of data. RLL compression on grayscale images from CCDs is very efficient and could easily be accomplished by existing radiation hardened processors.

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