The Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope (WAET) is a ground-based optical telescope layout in which one dimension of a filled aperture can be made very, very large (beyond 100 m) at low cost and complexity. With an unusual beam path but an otherwise-conventional optics, we obtain a fully-steerable telescope on a low-rise mount with a fixed gravity vector on key components. Numerous design considerations and scaling laws suggest that WAET can be far less expensive than other giant segmented mirror telescopes.
@article{arxiv.1801.00822,
title = {Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope: a low-cost flat configuration for a 100+ meter ground based telescope},
author = {Benjamin Monreal and Christian Rodriguez and Ama Carney and Rob Halliday and Mingyuan Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.00822},
year = {2018}
}