NASA's Giant Pinhole Camera

Cecil writes "The University of Colorado at Boulder has come up with an interesting proposal, and NASA has decided it has enough merit to give it funding. They're developing what is in essence a pinhole camera where the pinhole is 30 feet wide, and the "film" is tens of thousands of miles away. The "New Worlds Imager" as it is called, may eventually have enough resolution to get visual images of extrasolar planets as small as Earth's moon around stars 100 light years away, and would be able to search them for the key signs of life-as-we-know-it, like oxygen, water, and ozone. Other ideas that NASA will be developing include a lunar space elevator and magnetized beam plasma propulsion."

Inverse Pinhole: Occulation

[G4from128k]

Onc can do similar observations with inverse optics using asteroid occultations [asteroidoccultation.com]. I suppose one could create an artificial asteroid and watch as it passes in front of stars as it orbits or create a detector satellite with an ion engine that visits occultation zones between selected stars and satellites.

Re:Maybe I'm missing something.

[deglr6328]

IANAP but I just can't see how this will work. Imagine a hubble size telescope (still relatively tiny in the scheme of things here) staring at the "pinhole", a couple hundred foot wide hole TEN THOUSAND miles away....What's it going to get, like 10 photons a second or something ridiculous?? Therefore, I would tend to think the exposure times required to create any kind of meaningful image using this scheme would be insanely long....like...weeks. How can you possibly image a planet like earth orbiting its star like that? It's just going to look like a smear due to movement in its orbit and rotation during such a long period.

Think back to the high school elective photography class you probably didn't take. The first thing we did was to make positive images on photo paper with pinhole cameras, I remember distinctly that the exposure times, where you had to sit perfectly still with your little cardboard box, were agonizingly long!!