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A novel "spider eye" telescope that is part of a new DARPA-funded project has been shown by Lockheed Martin's "spider eye" telescope. This one features a system that has hundreds of tiny lenses, reports the Daily Mail.

Traditionally, a telescope uses just one big lens, but the new project, called the Segmented Plant Imaging Detector for Electro-Optical Reconnaissance (SPIDER), creates telescopes using a large array of smaller lenses. The team is sure that the design would permit telescope designs to "shrink by a factor of 10 to 100".

High-resolution imaging is required by telescopes in space so that they can resolve remote objects. It involves bigger designs and higher costs for launch. As telescopes collect light and reflect it to create images of remote objects, larger telescopes are required, reports Telegraph.

"We can only scale the size and weight of telescopes so much before it becomes impractical to launch them into orbit and beyond," said Danielle Wuchenich, senior research scientist at Lockheed Martin. "Besides, the way our eye works is not the only way to process images from the world around us."

The SPIDER project is using interferometry to reduce the telescope sizes. This would collect photons with the help of tiny lenses instead of large mirrors or lenses. These are at present utilised in global observatories so that they can gather information over long periods, eventually collecting them into excessive high-resolution images of space objects.

"What's new is the ability to build interferometer arrays that have the same number of channels as a digital camera," said senior fellow Alan Duncan, who also works at Lockheed Martin.

This is the first novel design since the original one 400 years ago.

It offers flexible configuration options for the eyes, safer orbit forays and a shift towards thin-disk shapes, such as squares and hexagons, unlike current cylindrical telescope shapes, according to Tech Times.

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