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Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Finding life with flowers in space


Recently, I was attending this course at College de France on observational interferometry. In it, Antoine Labeyrie was proposing the setting of mirrors along an hypersurface looking like a flower to build a Carlina hypertelescope. The word Carlina comes from this flower : the Carlina Acanthifolia.

It just so happens that Daniele Mortari proposed a flower constellation for spacecrafts flying around the earth. By enabling a baseline of 100,000 kms instead of the 150 kms now envisioned with Labeyrie's telescope, the flower constellation may have a bright future to find exo-planets. During this course, I met a fellow with interesting views on heterodyning.

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