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Comment by Dopameaner | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered if we could somehow get a James webb telescope revolving around all planets of our solar system in the next 1000 years. That should give us pretty awesome visuals.

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Huh, why would you want to do that?

If you have the resources to spare, you can do much better than replicating James Webb style telescopes. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

I want to venture that 1000 years is pessimistic. I just hope governments or private entities open up their wallets to build and launch more and better telescopes.

I'm reading the whole JWST project is estimated to cost $10 billion. That's about 4.4 overpriced Twitters, 77 US Department of Defense budgets (just for 2023), and 11.7 Facebook annual revenues.

We have the technology and the means, what's lacking now is the will.

Your maths is upside down, I think. $10 billion is 10/44 ≈ 0.227 overpriced Twitters, 10/816.7 ≈ 0.0122 US DoD budgets, etc.

What would be the benefit of the telescope orbiting other planets than earth?

I can't imagine any, besides redundancy and more observation time.

Interferometry.

There's definitely a benefit to placing a decent telescope outside the asteroid belt. From Earth, we get a lot of light reflected from the Sun from dust orbiting somewhere between Earth and 2 AU from the Sun, which pollutes our space images - it's called the Zodiacal Light [0]. A telescope outside this light pollution would be able to see faint objects much more clearly and easily than Webb.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_light

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