ANBARASUASOKAN

DARPA has announced planes to use a foldable plastic lens to “break the glass ceiling” of space telescopes. It’s part of the agency’s Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE) program, which aims at replacing conventional glass optics with lightweight polymer membranes that may one day make possible a foldable plastic orbital telescope 20 m (65 ft) wide that will be capable of seeing a medium-sized dog on Earth from 36,000 km (22,000 mi) away. Putting telescopes into Earth orbit was one of the earliest and most successful goals of the space age. They’ve revolutionized astronomy with the groundbreaking discoveries of the   Hubble   and   Kepler   missions soon to be added to by the planned   James Webb Space Telescope . Less obvious, but equally important are the telescopes that point in the other direction to keep an eye on the Earth for tasks ranging from weather forecasting to military reconnaissance. The problem is that these telescopes are based largely on gla