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The capability of maintaining two satellites in precise relative position, stable in a celestial coordinate system, would enable major advances in a number of scientific disciplines and with a variety of types of instrumentation. The common requirement is for formation flying of two spacecraft with the direction of their vector separation in inertial coordinates precisely controlled and accurately determined as a function of time. We consider here the scientific goals that could be achieved with such technology and review some of the proposals that have been made for specific missions. Types of instrumentation that will benefit from the development of this type of formation flying include 1) imaging systems, in which an optical element on one spacecraft forms a distant image recorded by a detector array on the other spacecraft, including telescopes capable of very high angular resolution; 2) systems in which the front spacecraft of a pair carries an occulting disk, allowing very high dynamic range observations of the solar corona and exoplanets; 3) interferometers, another class of instrument that aims at very high angular resolution and which, though usually requiring more than two spacecraft, demands very much the same developments.
An international consortium is presently constructing a beamformer for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile that will be available as a facility instrument. The beamformer will aggregate the entire collecting area of the a
The National Academy Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science (CAPS) made a recommendation to study a large/medium-class dedicated space telescope for planetary science, going beyond the Discovery-class dedicated planetary space telescope endo
The ultimate astronomical observatory would be a formation flying interferometer in space, immune to atmospheric turbulence and absorption, free from atmospheric and telescope thermal emission, and reconfigurable to adjust baselines according to the
At peak, long-duration gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous sources of electromagnetic radiation known. Since their progenitors are massive stars, they provide a tracer of star formation and star-forming galaxies over the whole of cosmic history. T
The processes that transform gas and dust in circumstellar disks into diverse exoplanets remain poorly understood. One key pathway is to study exoplanets as they form in their young ($sim$few~Myr) natal disks. Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) such a