I was reading another article which discussed taking measurements of distance stars at 6-month intervals to create a 3D map of their relative positions and direction of movement. This got me to thinking... has anyone proposed 'dropping' stationary satellites outside of Earth's orbital path for continuous monitoring even when our planet is no longer in that spot? It seems like such an arrangement could provide constant monitoring of things that are happening on the far side of the sun, and they could each act as a relay to each other, bringing the signals back around where we could receive them.
It could be fascinating to be able to constantly monitor the path of know comets, or perhaps even to detect large meteors which are safely away from us now but might some day pose a threat. Studies like mapping star positions could rapidly expand with the availability of continuous data feeds, and I'm sure if such a tool were available scientists would come up with a host of new experiments to try.
A couple other things also come to mind. First off is radio telescopes, which can gather more sensitive data by having sensors further apart. Of course in this case they would only be able to peer in two directions unless you set up the array to rotate as a singular ring (which greatly increases the complexity). The other idea was that I know some phenomena are so large that it takes a huge array of telescopes or sensors to even detect them, and something this large could detect truly astounding low frequency events. Throw in some gravity detectors and watch as the waves propagate through our solar system.
I'm just thinking there's a lot of possibilities here and a lot more data could be collected if we could drop four or eight satellites along the way. I would assume the idea has been proposed before, I just didn't know if this is even feasible?
I think what you're describing is Lagrange Points
Also, you can't "drop" satellites anywhere. If they aren't in orbit around the Sun, they fall into the Sun. That's what gravity is.
Well that's a cool thing, obviously somebody did the math! Not exactly what I had in mind but this is obviously a more viable idea to work with, at least for getting something out to L4 and L5, and would certainly give us a much wider viewing angle around the sun.
There are STEREO and Osiris rex already in L4 and 5
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_points
That page says the three probes all passed near L4 and L5, not that they're parked there?
Huh, I wasn't so sure about Osiris-Rex but I totally remembered STEREO A & B as stationary at L4 and L5.
Note to self: re-read the sources you quote.
Haha no worries, god knows I've done that too!
Hard to park given the delta V necessary to get there.
Not sure if what you propose is wholly doable due to everything always moving. Ie. even at fixed points the points are not fixed, they must orbit something.
Parking would then be to move with a “fixed” point’s relative orbit.