I'm wondering, in the search for extraterestrial worlds, we can currently only see planets about jupiter's size or larger. seeing anything as small as our world is kinda out of the question at the moment.

I was thinking, when they enhance an image from a security camera or some low quality footage, they take multiple shots of the same thing, and with all the low quality shots they can drive a single, higher-quality shot to show a man's face, words, whatever.

I think the same technique is being applied to astronomy, but we only have ground-stations and a single orbiting telescope. What if we were to make many inexpensive hubble-like telescopes that we put in various orbits (or the same, I'm not sure) and have them all work in unison?

I'm not too familiar with optics, so i'm not sure how big and how many telescopes we'd be talking. Anyone care to venture a guess? We're talking something that gives rough images of earth-sized planets in other solar systems, which is no small feat.

It's likely more a problem of not enough light coming from the object, than it being too small to image clearly.

Conceivably, with greater light-collecting capability, one could just barely 'visualize' objects the size of Earth in near-by star systems, but it would take a HUGE telescope. Lots of smaller telescopes would also work, but I would surmise we're talking hundreds to thousands of them in orbit.

The Keck is currently a twin telescope (two, side by side), with both images processed to give an enhanced resolution. It is being proposed to make lots of 'outrigger' telescopes, small ones surrounding the two large main ones, to enhance the images even further. Those would not increase the light collecting capability much, but instead allow for image processing along the lines you've suggested.

Here's the radio version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array

Question: What's best for viewing space. A huge telescope, or multiple smaller telescopes?

Because I'm thinking that the most important think in a telescope is the surface area of the reflecting mirror. Like 4in radius mirror will be twice as strong as two 2in radius mirrors. Because if thats true, then a very large reflecting surface in space will be exponentially better and cheaper.

You could apply some Darwinism to the big vs multiple small question.

For instance we could suggest the human eye is big in comparison to a flies eye, however the fly has an eye which is actually like multiple sensors added together to give a kind of dotmatrix representation of vision. This means the fly might not be too good at looking at long distances for clarity, however it's much more designed to allow the fly to see movement.

If this was applied to telescopes, you could suggest mutliple arrays would be able to track moving objects, while larger telescopes would give us a greater clarity on one object that we choose to view.

Well I did think of that, but then dismissed it because the distance between telescopes when arranged in an array is probably like 100 - 200m, and what could that possibly do when tracking objects LYs away?

I agree, if we could make a single, massive telescope, likely in orbit because I don't know where we'd fit an optical telescope of that magnitude on earth, that would be better, but in terms of a budget government would be glad to fund section at a time for, a multiple telescope system would let a government do a "trial" run with, say, 10% of the needed smaller telescopes and work the bugs out of the systems with them. If convinced, the rest would be purchased. This kind of ease doesn't come with a superior, masive-scale orbiting structure that only works after billions have been dumped into it.

Kind of a paradox...