The Optical Very Large Array project (OVLA): a concept for kilometric ground-based hypertelescopes
Proceedings of the European Interferometry Initiative Workshop organized in the context of the 20005 Joint European and National Astronomy Meeting "Distant Worlds"
LISE - Collège de France, Observatoire de Haute-Provence, France J. Dejonghe
LISE - Collège de France, Observatoire de Haute-Provence, France
CNRS, Observatoire de Haute-Provence, France
LISE - Collège de France, Observatoire de Haute-Provence, France
Abstract
The Optical Very Large Array (OVLA) concept initially proposed by Labeyrie in 1987 became a generic concept for kilometric arrays of telescopes, now considered for various projects such as KEOPS (Vakili et al.) or ELSA (Quirrenbach). As the effective aperture of a CARLINA-type hypertelescope seems to be limited to several hectometers, we show here how to combine the advantages of the hypertelescope beam combination with those of OVLA, in order to design large ground-based kilometric hypertelescopes opening new capabilities for analyzing extra-solar planets and faint extragalactic sources.