NASA's Giant Pinhole Camera

Cecil writes "The University of Colorado at Boulder has come up with an interesting proposal, and NASA has decided it has enough merit to give it funding. They're developing what is in essence a pinhole camera where the pinhole is 30 feet wide, and the "film" is tens of thousands of miles away. The "New Worlds Imager" as it is called, may eventually have enough resolution to get visual images of extrasolar planets as small as Earth's moon around stars 100 light years away, and would be able to search them for the key signs of life-as-we-know-it, like oxygen, water, and ozone. Other ideas that NASA will be developing include a lunar space elevator and magnetized beam plasma propulsion."

Comments

Re:Huh?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

The dark box isn't necessary if you can restrict the light getting to the film some other way. The article mentioned that the detector would be attached to a telescope, so that would prevent light entering from any place other than the pinhole lens.

Most large telescopes don't have tubes either, since they aren't strictly needed, and they weigh a lot. See the photo of the scope at: http://gemini.physics.ox.ac.uk/photos/geminin-tele scope-lr.gif or at http://www.apo.nmsu.edu/Site/3.5m_Images/telescope 06.JPEG