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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

Of course, even better strategy is to just sit at home and create a small fleet of drones that can use Sun's gravity as a lens to observe planet surfaces in nearby stellar systems with resolution in kilometers per pixel.

At least this could be accomplished within our lifetimes.

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Not very easy. Focal point needs to be dynamic and is very far away. Also the receivers are complex and not just a piece of mirror. Doable yes, but extremely costly. James Webb is nothing compared to a sun telescope

You compliment me by thinking it is my idea.

No, it is not. It is actually being seriously worked on by Nasa.

Also, they use the word "affordable". Now, in case if NASA this can mean practically anything, but there is chance it is not prohibitively expensive.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_...

This is awesome!

Another reason to be bullish on SpaceX starship. Being able to send mass to space on the cheap opens up many new astronomical exploration avenues.

Do you have any reference links? This sounds amazing.

Enjoy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

The one downside is that you need multiple missions to observe just single target. The mission could potentially be modified to be good for more than one target but at the cost of length of the mission. The path of drones would have two intersect two points that need to be reached to observe two targets, but that would require most likely less hyperbolic (meaning slower) escape trajectory.

The major benefit is that we don't need to invent anything new -- all required technology already exists. And the mission wouldn't even be that costly (at least in comparison). Just select the target, build (a dozen?) drones, shoot them on a right orbit into the Sun's gravity well and wait something like 20 years until they reach destination.

Definitely seems like the kind of thing that would be made way more feasible with the advent of Starship bringing down launch costs 100x

Holy cow, this is incredible. How have I not heard of this concept before?? Guess I'm one of today's lucky 10,000

10,000 only applies to a concept that reasonably is known to everybody or almost everybody before they die (like the fact mentos thrown into bottle of pepsi does funny things).

I suspect that only very, very small number of people are aware of this mission profile:)

You perhaps spent too less time with HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22952348

This has been talked about on centauri dreams lots of times. Example: https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2020/12/10/developing-focal-...

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