Some examples: https://www.dragonflytelescope.org/gallery.html is an array of telescopes (long off the shelf photographic lenses) to achieve exactly that. Photographic lenses tend to give higher image quality, but don’t gather enough light. Solution? Stack many of them and point in the same direction. It’s not just a flight of fancy, they made some breakthrough science with this.
A somewhat less relevant case is ALMA - millimetre wave array in the Atacama. Millimetre waves are a bit longer than IR, somewhat between IR and microwave, and telescopes look like radio dishes, not optical devices. Anyway, the array stacks many tens of such receivers to produce one antenna with a massive effective diameter. In this case, the key advantage is in fact resolution: by spreading the dishes around, you get much higher overall resolution than one massive dish, something we probably couldn’t achieve with IR (too computationally expensive).
Whether launching 10 satellites with 1/3 mirror diameter is cheaper is a whole different question.
Some examples: https://www.dragonflytelescope.org/gallery.html is an array of telescopes (long off the shelf photographic lenses) to achieve exactly that. Photographic lenses tend to give higher image quality, but don’t gather enough light. Solution? Stack many of them and point in the same direction. It’s not just a flight of fancy, they made some breakthrough science with this.
A somewhat less relevant case is ALMA - millimetre wave array in the Atacama. Millimetre waves are a bit longer than IR, somewhat between IR and microwave, and telescopes look like radio dishes, not optical devices. Anyway, the array stacks many tens of such receivers to produce one antenna with a massive effective diameter. In this case, the key advantage is in fact resolution: by spreading the dishes around, you get much higher overall resolution than one massive dish, something we probably couldn’t achieve with IR (too computationally expensive).
Whether launching 10 satellites with 1/3 mirror diameter is cheaper is a whole different question.