That, and the dragonfly-helicopter-thing on Titan. Have you ever seen the Sun set on a methane lake?
It's time for a rewatch of Europa Report (2013).
* Humans on Mars * Room temperature Superconductors and their effects on humanity. * Sustained Fusion Power for the masses. * General Artificial Intelligence * Human brain-computer interface. * Full reversal of climate change. * Extended human lifespan. * Curing all forms of cancer. * Universal translator for all human languages. * Discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life. * Understanding dark energy and dark matter. * A true virtual reality, indistinguishable from reality. * 100% renewable energy global infrastructure. * Establishing a lunar base. * Sentient AI companions. * Discovering the origin of life.
If you elect me, I will make all these come true!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
although last time I brought this up on HN someone explained to me it'd be very expensive, need to be huge, and it'd likely only point at one planet per lens, and the image would still be pretty blurry :(
> 2020, NASA physicist Slava Turyshev presented his idea of direct multi-pixel imaging and spectroscopy of an exoplanet with a solar gravitational lens mission. The lens could reconstruct the exoplanet image with ~25 km-scale surface resolution in 6 months of integration time, enough to see surface features and signs of habitability. His proposal was selected for the Phase III of the NIAC 2020 (NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts). Turyshev proposes to use realistic-sized solar sails (~16 vanes of 103 m2) to achieve the needed high velocity at perihelion (~150 km/sec), reaching 547 AU in 17 years.
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_...
We are pretty much already there, though there is room to improve, it's an amazing accomplishment though that I think we take for granted.
Likewise, solving antibiotic resistance.
Shame. We should be scrambling to land probes there yesterday.
With Europa Clipper there was also the incident that Congress tried to write into law that it had to launch on SLS. The Clipper team were leaning towards using Falcon Heavy ($90M). In the end Congress only relented because the Clipper team said they'd need another $1B in funding (in addition to the $2B+ for an SLS launch itself) to make the delicate instruments on Clipper capable of withstanding the extremely rough ride that SLS offers.
So now Europa Clipper will be a Jupiter orbiter that does several flybys of Europa.