Live Science: How to See ants 100,000 kilometers away with a Telescope?

Assuming an ant is 1 mm long, then if viewed from 10,000 km away, the ant would be approximately 3 x 10−43 times 10^{-4} milliarcseconds!!!

What is this concept? It is 100 times more accurate than the best current astronomical observations.

For an ideal optical system, whose maximum angular resolution is S≈1.220λr/a, ≈3947m when viewing ants with 550nm visible light is to construct a primary lens with a diameter of 3947m

It can clearly see a 10,000 mm ant from a kilometer away.

The largest telescope currently under construction is the Very Large Telescope in Chile, with a primary mirror 39 meters in diameter.

In order to ensure accurate imaging, the surface accuracy of the telescope is in the nanometer scale, and temperature differences and the weight of the lens itself can cause large deformation of the lens, affecting the accuracy. Atmospheric interference can even ruin your image. And the bigger the lens, the harder it is to make. Currently, large telescopes typically use lenses made from materials such as boron carbide, coated with aluminum, and multiple lenses used to form a single lens. The existing precision machining and precision control technology can not realize the diameter of 4000m optical telescope. After all, there is an order of magnitude difference.

The space telescope is not affected by atmospheric disturbance, gravity, temperature difference, etc., and can reach a diameter of 4000m. However, the largest space telescope, the James Webb Telescope, is 6.5 meters in diameter and weighs 6.2 tons. Its launch was delayed several times because it was too expensive ($1 billion). It takes tens of thousands of tons of boron carbide and other materials to make a 4000m caliber reflector, not to mention its servomechanics and even the spacecraft that carries it. This is the size of a Star Destroyer. We haven't put hundreds of thousands of tons into orbit yet.

Of course, we can also reduce the wavelength to observe. If 5.5nm extreme ultraviolet light is used, the lens aperture can be reduced to 39m. However, extreme ultraviolet rays cannot be transmitted through the air. They can only be used in space. The short wavelengths also cause problems for lensing materials, even requiring the use of grazing methods like the Chandra X-ray telescope, which adds to the difficulty of imaging. Compared to the current state of human technology, the corresponding manufacturing difficulty is an order of magnitude gap.

As a result, imaging the ants with a single telescope is beyond current technology.