Mission of NASA

A NASA team has been assigned a potential mission that might significantly advance our search for extraterrestrial life. This mission aims to address a fundamental question: Are we alone?

Currently, and even with future advancements, no instrument will be able to provide us with direct images of exoplanets. While the JWST has captured direct images, such as of a gas giant, it's not equipped to capture detailed images of smaller, Earth-like exoplanets. The size of the telescope required to achieve this would be prohibitively large.

For example, if we were to take Earth, which has a diameter of about 13,000 kilometers, and place it 100 light years away, imaging it with just one pixel would necessitate a telescope with a diameter of approximately 90 kilometers. This is about 55 miles—roughly the distance from New York City to Bridgeport, Connecticut, or from Los Angeles to San Bernardino. It's an impractically large size for a telescope lens, and even a 10-pixel image would require a telescope of 900 kilometers in diameter.

To tackle this issue, Slava and his team are utilizing a unique physical phenomenon: the solar gravitational lens. This technique could allow us to observe exoplanets directly before we have the capability to travel to these distant worlds.

Understanding gravitational lensing can be complex. To witness this phenomenon, three elements are necessary: a distant object like an exoplanet, a massive object like a star, and a telescope positioned to observe them in a straight line. Light can bend or refract, similar to how a straw appears bent in a glass of water. Lenses, such as those in glasses, bend light to correct vision or magnify objects.

Space-time can also be curved by the gravity of a massive object like a star, creating a lens effect. This curvature magnifies light from distant objects, much like strong reading glasses magnify text. If we observe this bending through a telescope, the light from the distant object appears as an Einstein ring—a ring-shaped image containing all the light from the luminous source.

To capture an Einstein ring, everything must be perfectly aligned. Observing a galaxy with another galaxy behind it, and positioning the telescope far enough to be in the convergence zone of light rays, is challenging but feasible with careful planning. Dr. Turyshev and his team plan to find an exoplanet, use a telescope, and employ the sun as the massive body to bend light and create an Einstein ring.

This method would allow us to obtain a high-resolution image of the exoplanet, potentially revealing details such as continents, weather patterns, and even city lights at night, which would indicate intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

To construct a high-resolution image from the Einstein ring, the telescope would take multiple pictures from slightly different angles to capture variations in brightness. These images would then be processed using deconvolution, a technique similar to how NASA assembled the detailed Earth images from data collected by satellites.

The challenge is finding a location for the telescope. It needs to be about 550 AU away, or roughly 82 billion kilometers, which is currently beyond our propulsion technology’s reach. Dr. Turyshev suggests using solar sails to provide the necessary propulsion. Although we're not there yet, solar sails are being tested in other missions. Once in place, the telescope could take pictures as long as it remains within the optimal focal plane, though repositioning it would be highly challenging.

Additionally, while current missions like JWST identify more exoplanets, deploying small, one-meter telescopes to the right locations could complement their findings. Initially thought to be science fiction, this concept is now considered feasible. No major obstacles have been found, and the idea of using the solar gravitational lens excites researchers and drives ongoing efforts.

While this mission is still in the research phase with no planned launches, it's an exciting prospect. If successful, we might have our first detailed image of an exoplanet by the 2060s, less than 100 years after the iconic Blue Marble photo taken in 1972. Let's hope we get to witness it.