Talk:Liquid-mirror space telescope

Proposed merge

I think this article should be made into a section of the article liquid mirror. 67.243.140.144 (talk) 12:35, 23 July 2010 (UTC)particle25

It's already a child article of Liquid-mirror telescope, which seems more appropriate. Praemonitus (talk) 14:55, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Gyroscopic effects

I am very skeptical about the workability of the concepts outlined in the article. They involve rotating the liquid about two axes simultaneously, one to simulate gravity and the other to form the paraboloid. This would produce gyroscopic effects that would make the liquid tend to spill out of the container. It would be better to simulate gravity with a continuous linear acceleration, maybe produced by an ion-drive rocket operating continuously for a long time. DOwenWilliams (talk) 19:26, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes - I'm dubious about the quality of this article. The only substantial cite to a space based liquid mirror is to an Space Based Liquid Ring Mirror Telescope which accelerates with an ion thruster and spins about a forward facing axis. So - that's your idea that seems sound enough to mention here

It also has a link to a long rambling google groups discussion. Where it seems clear that most of the ideas would simply result in a cylindrical mirror, as if you rotate a liquid in space unless it has significant self gravity or surface tension, then it would occupy an equipotential surface i.e. with the surface points all equidistant from the axis. There is one poster who makes that point over and over while others often ignore him. At any rate whatever its merits, this discussion is not an acceptable cite for wikipedia, not peer reviewed. Worth linking to on a talk page, yes, but I don't think for an actual article.

So the half toroid and balloon would seem to make cylindrical mirrors in both cases. And though you can use a sphere as a telescope with the Schmidt design, I don't think a cylinder will do - unless you only want to focus it in one dimension. A cylindrical mirror like that could be useful e.g. for a solar concentrator, focusing light from the sun, say, as a furnace onto an element that runs along the axis of the cylinder. But not sure how useful it would be for telescopic observations.

That leaves the idea of rotating around two axes simultaneously as you suggest as the only other idea in the list of suggestions that seems to have any substance. But I can't find any research into it yet. As you say, coriolis and gyroscopic effects would seem to be a significant potential issue. Will look a bit more.

A negative result is also worth mentioning so if someone has investigated this and shown it can't work, - and of course in a source suitable for citing in wikipedia, more substantial than a google groups discussion - that could be worth putting into the article, or if someone has found a way to make it work, ditto. Robert Walker (talk) 13:17, 11 June 2015 (UTC)