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Why should large telescopes be designed to observe solar system objects? The relative impact of planetary science to the other fields in astronomy can be debated, but here we look at this question in the light of a more pragmatic consideration: the issue of funding large facilities for astronomical research. Firstly, the education and public outreach (EPO) efforts of ground-based telescopes benefit signficantly from programs to support spacecraft missions, and from planetary science in general. Strong EPO leads to increased funding. Consider the now iconic image of Uranus shown in figure 1, which was produced with an early AO system on one of today’s large telescopes. Secondly, space agencies (NASA, ESA, etc) often fund high angular resolution at large observatories to vet mssion targets (Defrère, et al., 2008), to probe a target’s surroundings for spacecraft hazards (Merline, et al., 2012), and/or to characterize an object’s shape, size, density, and spin pole for missioning planning (Drummond, et al., 2010; Carry, et al., 2012). It is this second potential funding benefit that we address in this paper. We discuss here the expanding role of ground-based telescopes for remotely supporting spacecraft missions and, in particular, the role of high angular resolution. In section 2 we give examples of past and current spacecraft visits that have benefited from ground-based imaging and spectroscopy prior to their encounter. In section 3 we look at plans for the future, with emphasis on the role of the 23-to-39 meter telescopes, so-called extremely large telescopes (ELT), which are just now coming on line.

AO4ELT meets the Solar System: The coming interplay between adaptive optics on ELT, space telescopes, and spacecraft missions.