💫 NASA funds exoplanet surface imaging concept

NASA has backed a concept to capture images of continents and oceans on exoplanets many light years away. The challenge is the star’s brightness, about 10 billion times stronger than the planet’s reflected light, and their close proximity in the sky.

Physicists propose two solutions: a dynamic hierarchical nuller that cancels out starlight by combining light from multiple apertures, and a virtual telescope formed by two instruments spaced 100 km apart to achieve a giant effective aperture.

This approach could finally move exoplanet observation beyond single points of light to actual surface details, overcoming fundamental limits of telescope size and star glare.

📊@tech