One foundation of the modern technology is advanced sensing, surveying the space in different scales with various fields of physics.

For instance,

• light, laser, infrared, radio, X-ray, miniature radar, : essentially these are all EM waves
• sound, seismic waves, sonar, ultrasonic: which are mechanic waves
• gravitational waves!

...

Each of the subject has extensive research and applications done and ongoing. Many of these will start in lab and then be used in distance measurement (1-D), then be used in imaging (2-D) and ultimately space surveying (3-D).

I am no expert in any of the explicit topics but what I learned from physics is to think in first principle. That's how complexity collapses and technology reveals the nature.

What I do in astrophysics is just another aspect of the same principle. Except we have to use whatever we can and have to squeeze the information out. Because we don't have the energy for active measurement (shout and hear back) in such scale. Data analysis in astronomy tries to utilize every pixel or even the dynamical photon counts (band and wavelets over the time in radio astronomy) to infer the source characteristics.

A post first shared here.