NASA plans to use the Sun as a giant telescope, for what?

NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts is in the third phase of a project so that the Sun can be used as a giant telescope, a calculation initially made by Albert Einstein, who intuited that there is a region of the Solar System in which it is concentrated light from the front of the Sun, which has been deflected by the giant star’s gravity.

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This region is located 550 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun. One AU is equivalent to the distance between the Earth and the Sun. If a solar gravitational lens were placed in that region, the surfaces of exoplanets could be observed without having to design huge telescopes or sets of telescopes.

Scientist Von Russel Eshleman stated in a statement from Stanford University that “in principle, a spacecraft anywhere along that line could observe, listen and communicate at interstellar distances, using equipment comparable in size and power to that used now for interplanetary distances.”

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The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts project aims to place a gravitational lens on the opposite side of the Sun to obtain images of exoplanets. Until now, gravitational lenses are used to view distant objects, however, the location of the objects and what is behind them is a limitation.

In a statement, NASA explained that “even in the presence of the solar corona, the [relación señal-ruido] “It is high enough that in six months of integration the image of the exoplanet can be reconstructed with a surface resolution of 25 km scale, enough to see surface features and signs of habitability.”

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The project proposes to use a “swarm architecture” of small satellites using solar sails to propel them to the required position.