Why can't they send telescopes out into space to look for life?

Question

lol you always hear about telescopes and orbiting satellites being sent out to saturn and jupiter and everything so why can't they just sent out a bunch of telescopes into space to look for life?

Answer 1

They did, all the probes they sent to space have cameras and all kinds of advanced sensors the technology and budget can afford.

Answer 2

They could. Indeed the cameras located in the Cassini mission, now orbiting Saturn, are small telescopes. With them they have been able to photograph details of the rings, the shepherd moons and the lakes and mountains of Titan.

Telescopes could be sent to space and transmit images but after some years they would stop working for lack of energy reasons, and that is not enough time to search for alien life.

Answer 3

Everything they sent out into space is in the search for life. Even the satllites being sent out to Saturn and Jupiter. The Hubble telescope searches for life. They can't always get pictures of aliens waving their hands in the pictures but finding solar systems that have planets is a good start.

Answer 4

See cosmic distance scales.

But LOL, we do send telescopes out which are searching for planets. Corot is out there and has found a few already, Kepler to follow in a little over a year. The next generation of telescopes after that will likely be able to search for life.

:-)

Answer 5

That's the funniest question so far!

As of present day, scientists or astronomers are using satellites to identify lives on other planets. Finding lives on other planet in good enough. Telescope will just cost them more money and it doesn't do anything that is a big difference. Maybe someday they will design a telescope that can look for lives on other planets or in space, but today... nah!

Answer 6

The disadvantages are mainly to do with the hassle of operating in space. It's much more expensive, so you can't have such a large telescope. If things go wrong it's much harder to repair them. You can't update the instruments so often so they quickly become out of date. Also with the modern technique of Adaptive Optics (basically correcting for the turbulence of the atmosphere as you observe), ground based telescopes are catching up with the HST.

Answer 7

Every Satellite launched has several cameras. These have the capacity of telescopic image retrieval. Best site to visit is Hubble.org

Answer 8

your telling me send a telescope to each planet to look for life on each planet,you might be kidding,jupiter is a big planet and it has many moons as it's satellite if you send these 100's of these telescope costing 5 million US dollars then would you give me the money and when these telescope send us each images from 1000 of lightyears then you and i friend would get old and will you pay for all these .......
I am sorry for these words but this is the truth

Answer 9

OK. So we send a telescope to our nearest star which is 4 light years away. Oh, hell I don't want to figure it out. You'd be dead and buried a long time before the telescope got there. Its signal would take 4 years to arrive here and looking at the galaxy from our nearest star wouldn't reveal much more than from here.

Answer 10

There is no life on any other planets except there is a small, and a mean small, chance there is on a moon of jupiter which they are sending a probe to to dig down to the possible sea under the ice. Life needs plenty of heat, sufficient heat comes from stars, not all stars have planets, the nearest star will take hundreds of thousands of years AT LEAST to visit it and take a look with the technology we currently have, then just as long to return to earth.

Answer 11

We do have telescopes out there looking for life and exoplanets, to name a few are Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, Corot,,
you can go here to look up all the exoplanets that have been discovered to date,,;

http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm


Happy Holidays;

SG,