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

Inverse Pinhole: Occulation

[G4from128k]

Onc can do similar observations with inverse optics using asteroid occultations. I suppose one could create an artificial asteroid and watch as it passes in front of stars as it orbits or create a detector satellite with an ion engine that visits occultation zones between selected stars and satellites.