How big can be a space telescope ?

Greetings,

If you're talking about a Radio Telescope, they can be really large.
A field of about 50 dish antenna, laid out to form a "T", or a "X" or
a "Y", May have an effective aperture of several miles. On rare
occasions these Radio Telescope Arrays, are combined with others
around the world, to make the whole Earth into a telescope, with the
size of our planet. A few years back I read of plans to add orbiting
Radio Telescopes, but I haven't heard any more on the topic.

Arrays of telescopes and arrays or arrays of telescopes depend on
interferometer to work, this in turn requires that we accurately know
the position of each telescope to about 1/10th wavelength. This is
do-able with Radio frequencies. But not for Optical telescopes,
beyond a few 10's of meters. At least, not at this time.

Regards,

Dave Handwerk

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Douglas May wrote: