The Solar Gravitational Lens will Map Exoplanets. Seriously.

Christian Ready made a great video on his Youtube channel, Launch Pad Astronomy, about NASA's plans for a solar gravitational lens. It's got some great graphics and visualisations, and is accessibly narrated. I was inspired and learnt a lot of new ideas. ▶ this video (23 minutes)

There is a very high quality video about how Solar Gravitational Lens could be used to map exoplanets, and full explanations about the images reconstruction and engineering challenges: ▶ this video

Forget everything else, we need to build THIS : ▶ this video A telescope array that can use our sun's gravitational lens would enable us to resolve the surfaces of extrasolar planets. We could resolve surface features as small as 10 km across at a distance of 100 light years. JPL is actively investigating this. It's incredibly promising.

Forget Earth gravitational lenses, let's use the sun: ▶ this video (The whole video is great.) This setup could resolve the surfaces of exoplanets with its ~100 billion magnification. JPL is investigating.

This is the space project that most excites me and the one I most hope we solve in my lifetime. Much more interesting than Mars (not that you can't do both). This video on gravitational lensing blew my mind ▶ this video What do you think the odds are of if it being done IRL?

You CAN use for more than 1 target, you just need to reposition the telescope a bit. See [1], is a great great video on the subject. I can't recommend enough [1]: ▶ this video

The whole concept is that we should launch a fleet of them every few months. Very lightweight semi-autonomous smart lightsails with some optics. The first fleet helps targeting the second, and all those who come after them. ▶ this video (already linked by a sibling comment, but yes, can't recommend this enough!)

> A maintenance-free power source capable of lasting the 200 or so years it would take to make it to 542 AU It wouldn't take nearly that long. The proposal is to use solar sails. There is a nice video about the details on YouTube: ▶ this video

And hopefully some day we'll build a solar-gravitation lens to look at the surface of one of these exoplanets: link ...with a very interesting video that someone made on that paper: Someone also made an interesting Youtube video of the concept: ▶ this video

This video linked by another commenter explains it quite well: ▶ this video Basically, it's possible to generate an image of an exoplanet, but "retargeting" the telescope(s) to observe another object is not feasible. So you'd better make sure the target that the mission will focus upon is actually worth the attention it gets - but there are other planned telescopes that will be capable of generating data that will allow selecting potential candidates.

"Direct Imaging of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravity Lens (1 Km Resolution)": link ...and an excellent video on the topic: ▶ this video

Plan to photograph an exoplanet 25 light years away with 25km per pixel resolution (2020) This is fascinating. There is a plan to directly photograph exoplanets by sending a series of telescopes 500+ AU in the opposite direction of what we want to photograph and using the sun as a gravitational lens. We send out waves of these small telescopes to get pictures at various focal planes. This video has a good description of the paper: ▶ this video