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

by wooster on 2/27/18, 12:20 AM with 19 comments

• by sanxiyn on 2/27/18, 4:17 AM

  For a more critical look at this concept, I recommend "Mission to the Gravitational Focus of the Sun: A Critical Analysis".

  https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06351

• by nategri on 2/27/18, 1:32 AM

  This is insanely cool. I had no idea this was possible.

  If I'm reading right the spacecraft would have to be placed at about 600-850 AU from the sun to take advantage of the solar gravity lens. For reference, Pluto's orbit is located at (roughly) 40 AU.

• by coldnose on 2/27/18, 1:34 AM

  This sounds like moonshot-level complexity. It invokes solar sails, laser communication at 550 AU, as well as "advanced propulsion, lightweight telescopes, membrane mirrors, inflatable/rigidizeable structures, and novel coronagraphic techniques." All that for a telescope you can't aim...

• by curtis on 2/27/18, 7:02 AM

  I've wondered for a while if this could be done. I guess now I know. The potential for exploiting the Sun as a gravitation lens comes up on Centauri Dreams from from time to time (see https://www.google.com/search?q=%22gravitational+lens%22+sit...).

• by mturmon on 2/27/18, 2:49 AM

  This is the workshop where some of these ideas were discussed: http://kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/ism/ism.html There appear to be several groups working on related designs for gravity-based imagers.

  One of the three organizers of the workshop is Ed Stone, who is the Voyager PI.

• by cromwellian on 2/27/18, 5:13 AM

  NASA's WFIRST mission is trying to do gravitional microlensing observations, but Trump's latest budget kills it.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Tel...

• by loxias on 2/27/18, 12:19 PM

  Is there anyone who's sufficiently qualified in astronomy/astrophysics who could point out what advances in HPC/modelling/signal processing will be necessary to accelerate things like this?

  I don't know telescopes but I know enough about DSP to make me suspect this is gonna need all sorts of fun high performance deconvolution algorithms....

• by pizza on 2/27/18, 12:57 AM

  Related projects [0]

  Imaging With Nature: Planet Sized Sensors (July 24th, 2010)

  Imaging With Nature: A Cloud Based Sun Imager (July 25th, 2010)

  A Galaxy Wide Single Pixel Camera (November 6th, 2010)

  [0] https://sites.google.com/site/igorcarron/thesetechdonotexist

• by jagger27 on 2/27/18, 12:42 PM

  While forming a complete image is no doubt very cool, just a few fragments of light spectrum would give us incredible insight on its own.

  I'm wondering now if with BFR we could pre-place fuel in the slingshot path to get it there quicker and depend less on the Sun gravity slingshot.