It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
PARIS -- Desolate, airless and with no people around for hundreds of thousands of kilometers (miles), the Moon is a great place -- for astronomers, that is.
But making telescopic mirrors -- dozens are needed in a giant complex -- is eye-wateringly expensive, for it requires grinding and polishing glass to an accuracy of a few tens of billionths of a meter. And, after making a mirror, there's the risk of breaking it when you haul it to the Moon.
Enter an idea that has been kicked around for more than a century and a half -- the liquid mirror telescope.