A Telescope That Could Spot Planet’s Surface

NASA or National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been funding and developing a new telescope that could spot or see the surface of a faraway planet including continents, oceans, vegetation, and lights during night or a sign of habitability on it.

The telescope is aim to get a high-resolution images from distant or faraway planets or known as exoplanets. Not only planets beyond our sun but also stars on the exoplanet.

The telescope is known as “Solar Gravitational Lens” or SGL which NASA said have the ability to view and see signs of habitability on an exoplanet.

“NASA is working on a new telescope and hope to raise some funding from government and private donations for a solar gravitational lens (SGL) that would send back multipixel images of possible habitable planets.” (Intelligent Living)

“The idea is to “directly image a habitable Earth-like exoplanet within our stellar neighborhood,” according to a description of the project. Over six months of observation, we could get a resolution of around 25 km, “enough to see surface features and signs of habitability”” (Futurism)

The telescope will use sun’s gravity as a lens that will magnify the image or view of an exoplanet or distant or faraway planetary system. Thus, the telescope is called, “Solar Gravity Lens”(SGL) or “Solar Gravity Telescope”.

“”Solar Gravity Lens is a unique gift from nature that allows us to do direct high-resolution imaging of faint sources,” says Slava Turyshev from NASA’s Jet propulsion Laboratory in California, the lead on the project, “No other techniques allow us to do [this].”” (Forbes)

“The idea behind the SGL makes use of something called a gravitational lens. About a century ago, Albert Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity that objects with mass in the universe must produce a gravitational dent in space itself. The more massive the object, the bigger this effect. Decades later, astronomers saw this in action with astonishing effect. Known as an Einstein ring, they have been able to spot light from a distant star or galaxy being bent around a closer galaxy, magnifying the view of the distant object. Such effects allow us to see distant galaxies in the universe that would otherwise be invisible. But, goes the theory behind the SGL, what if we used our own sun as a magnifying lens to see smaller distant objects – like planets? It turns out that, like a lens, our sun has a gravitational “focal length”. If you line it up with a planet up to 100 light-years away, you could observe a magnified image of said planet I you were more than 548 AU away from the sun in the other direction (1 AU, astronomical unit, is the distance from Earth to the Sun).That is what the SGL mission hopes to do. Flying to such a position and with just a one-meter telescope, Turyshev says you could see a planet the size of Earth 100 light-years away with impressive resolution, and detect features on the surface as small as 10 kilometers.” (Forbes)

“The SGL telescope, if it were to be launched, would offer us unprecedented views of alien worlds.” (Forbes)

“If the project does come into fruition, it would give us the most detailed glimpse of another planetary system ever.” (Forbes)

The project is under NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) and gone Phase I and Phase II.

The project will answer our question – Are we alone in the universe? Are there other beings like us out there?

 

SGL will took similar to this capture of Planet Earth as reports said (image from Forbes website)