alt Hacker NewsWe should build a solar lens telescope. By the time we're ready to use it, we'll have a bunch of candidates to point it at.
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There's a project that's going well from NASA for this. Still a moonshot but they've progressed through the early stages well so far.
https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...
An even more ridiculous dream of mine: I hope that aliens build a similarly amazing telescope, point it at Earth, and share the images with us, so that we can _see_ our Earth in the distant past.
In theory we can then get 100 meter resolution on alien worlds. That would be insane.
A kilometer scale telescope contract would exercise all the right pipelines for massive orbital buildout like in-situ assembly, multi-lift cadences, and big-old infra. And it'd look cool as hell in the night sky during assembly.
There is no "building" such a thing. All we could do right now is send the "telescope probe" >500AU away, on the opposite side of the sun from the observation target, then hope it still works 80 years later or so when it gets there.
Edit: My point is that you can't "build" such a thing and later point it somewhere-- you have to fly the camera part of the "telescope" about 3 times as far as voyager 1 went, exactly opposite of your observation target, and it is not gonna stay there for too long either.
As long as we improve rapidly at both drone-building and exoplanet target selection, it is not really gonna be worthwhile because both the drone hardware and the target will be hopelessly obsolete before we even get halfway to the observation point.
The wild thing is that, if I understand it correctly, if you were floating in a spacesuit at the same spot you'd also see that resolution (likely highly distorted) with the naked eye.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOLIMAN
https://toliman.space/
They’re building one for stars within 10 parsecs of the sun ( and more specifically for Alpha Centauri) which should launch in the next year