ThinksMarkedly wrote:Loren Pechtel wrote:You just gave me a nasty thought: We are looking at beam divergence for grasers, but we aren't using gamma rays for our aiming. As you say, even the Hubble isn't even in the ballpark for resolving the target--how can you aim more accurately than you can resolve?
Angular resolution depends on the aperture and the wavelength of the image being resolved. For the same aperture, a wavelength 10x smaller resolves 10x better.
The HST sees visible light and near infrared. The JWST will see near infrared, which means it'll see "more poorly" than Hubble, despite being superior equipment, because it sees longer wavelengths.
Looks like gamma rays are no longer separated from X-rays by wavelength, but the old definition was wavelengths shorter than 10 pm or 0.01 nm. That's 2000x shorter than visible light.
Which is completely missing my point. All the discussion is on whether grasers can hit at those kind of ranges--and I agree they can. The aiming system, however, isn't working in the gamma spectrum unless your target is for some reason emitting a bunch of gamma rays.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be the first time we have seen aiming ability beyond what should be possible.