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Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravity Lens Mission

...and an excellent video someone made about that paper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

That was fascinating. I guess problems of scarcity / economics mean we can't just launch a spherical shell of satellites into the 500ish AU orbit of the sun, not to mention the data retention requirements but man that would be even more awesome just to be able to synthesize an image at any point in the 100ly range... One can only dream I guess, but even just a single image of a single planet's surface would blow everyone's mind I think, so string of pearls it is! Please happen.

That's probably a decent next step, I'd estimate two decades, after the James Webb telescope going online soon. Hoping for a good launch.

Oh don't remind me of JWT. I'm actively pretending it doesn't exist until it gets results because if anything happens, I mean there's different degrees of disaster but in terms of... you know let's just pretend we never mentioned it.

"just don't think about it, Morty"

We better hurry that up. 500 AU is 3.5 times more than Voyagers currently made, and it took them 40+ years to get there. It would be interesting to fiddle with fuel/payload/acceleration/speed metrics with LEO [re]fuel.

At ~14:20 in the video they start describing the solar sails that get the spacecraft up to 22 AU/year in velocity, passing Pluto's orbit in 2 years (230,000 miles/hour or 105,000 m/s or 0.035%*c).

I am interested in that. Thanks for sharing!

That is a really interesting video!

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