Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

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The other day I was wondering what was coming after James Webb and if I'd be able to see the results in my lifetime.

And then I stumbled across the 100-year-plan to build a "Solar Gravitational Lens"

Would have resolution of 10 square kilometers per pixel for objects 100 light-years away.

Blew my mind to the point I still think about it every few days

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_...

https://phys.org/news/2022-10-solar-gravitational-lens-human...

More "down to earth" (literally) is the Giant Magellan Telescope in 2029 which will have four times the resolution of James Webb but since it is earth-bound I guess atmosphere is going to limit details without AI enhancement

Adding: ooh ELT is 2027, even better, look at Hubble/James Webb in comparison bottom left

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Comparis...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope#Comp...

A bit more plausibly near future, but there was a story about how NASA was testing a method to cast perfect lenses from little more than a mold and a liquid material. If successful, a spacecraft could unfold a frame, release the lens mirror material, and create a surface tens of meters in diameter, all constructed in space. Undoubtedly significant engineering hurdles, but it could result in an order of magnitude improvement in telescope resolution for cheap.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/nasa-tries-new-ways-fluid-...

There was a PBS SpaceTime on the solar gravitational lens proposal not that long ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d0EGIt1SPc

I started watching PBS SpaceTime recently and it really is an exceptionally entertaining channel.

PBS has lots of other similar channels, I liked the math one but it's been discontinued

The irony of ending Infinite Series...

Do not miss Fermilab's Don Lincoln videos.

Here is an awesome video about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

...and the paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421

I often wonder when or if we might see a photo of a planet around another star and what might it take to do it.

Already been done. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exop...

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