Lockheed Martin has revealed its new "spider eye" telescope, which is part of a new DARPA-funded project, that features a system with hundreds of tiny lenses, according to the Daily Mail. The project, dubbed the Segmented Plant Imaging Detector for Electro-Optical Reconnaissance (SPIDER), is designed to create telescopes that use a vast array of smaller lenses as opposed to the traditional telescopes that utilize just one large lens. Furthermore, the team claims that this design will allow telescope designs to shrink by a factor of 10 to 100.
Telescopes utilized in space require high-resolution imaging in order to properly resolve far away objects, which typically means bigger designs and thus higher costs for launching them into orbit. This lies in the fact that telescopes work by collecting light and reflecting it to create an image - for far away objects, this typically means a bigger telescope is needed, according to the Telegraph.
"We can only scale the size and weight of telescopes so much before it becomes impractical to launch them into orbit and beyond," said Danielle Wuchenich, senior research scientist at Lockheed Martin. "Besides, the way our eye works is not the only way to process images from the world around us."
In order to reduce telescope size, the SPIDER project is taking advantage of a technique called interferometry, which gathers photons using tiny lenses instead of bulky mirrors or larger lenses. These vast arrays are currently used in observatories around the world in order to collect data over long periods of time and eventually compiles it into extremely high-resolution images of space objects.
"What's new is the ability to build interferometer arrays that have the same number of channels as a digital camera," said senior fellow Alan Duncan, who also works at Lockheed Martin.
This technology also allows for more flexible configuration options for the eyes, reduced risk when in orbit and the move towards thin-disk shapes, such as squares and hexagons, as opposed to the cylindrical telescope shapes that dominate the field today, according to Tech Times.
The new project marks the first new telescope design since the original 400 years ago, according to Gizmag.
Take a look at the SPIDER technology below.
