Oblate is a spacecraft concept for a 6.5 m oblate-spheroid multifunctional space observatory at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, developed as an independent engineering study. The design integrates two subsystems of markedly different maturity, presented and evaluated separately in this document. The first is a tiled, multifunctional hull skin (4,842 CF-PEKK panels) intended to combine structure, distributed photon-counting spectrophotometry (MKID, 0.1–5 μm), and distributed quantum magnetometry (Vʙ⁻-in-hBN) in a single 17-19 layer functional stack per tile. This architecture is presented as TRL 1–2: it requires dedicated experimental campaigns to establish manufacturing yield, thermal performance, and lifetime data before its viability in the L2 environment can be confirmed or ruled out, and is offered here as a documented research direction rather than a flight-ready design. The second is the Tetrapod system: a four-transceiver coherent laser-ranging network, synchronized to a shared atomic-clock epoch, that measures and actively compensates the relative position of four independently mounted telescopes to co-phase them into a single synthetic-aperture interferometer. This subsystem is structurally and functionally independent of the tile skin, builds on flight-demonstrated ranging principles (GRACE-FO LRI, LISA Pathfinder), and is assessed as a comparatively mature, independently viable concept for multi-aperture telescope alignment, applicable beyond this specific mission. This work documents the full derivation, error budgets, and open items for both subsystems, and is intended primarily to establish a public, dated record of the Tetrapod architecture as an independently viable metrology and alignment concept.
Dario Maurelli (Sun,) studied this question.