This is insanely cool. I had no idea this was possible.
If I'm reading right the spacecraft would have to be placed at about 600-850 AU from the sun to take advantage of the solar gravity lens. For reference, Pluto's orbit is located at (roughly) 40 AU.
This sounds like moonshot-level complexity. It invokes solar sails, laser communication at 550 AU, as well as "advanced propulsion, lightweight telescopes, membrane mirrors, inflatable/rigidizeable structures, and novel coronagraphic techniques." All that for a telescope you can't aim...
I've wondered for a while if this could be done. I guess now I know. The potential for exploiting the Sun as a gravitation lens comes up on Centauri Dreams from from time to time (see https://www.google.com/search?q=%22gravitational+lens%22+sit...).
This is the workshop where some of these ideas were discussed: http://kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/ism/ism.html There appear to be several groups working on related designs for gravity-based imagers.
One of the three organizers of the workshop is Ed Stone, who is the Voyager PI.
NASA's WFIRST mission is trying to do gravitional microlensing observations, but Trump's latest budget kills it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Tel...
Is there anyone who's sufficiently qualified in astronomy/astrophysics who could point out what advances in HPC/modelling/signal processing will be necessary to accelerate things like this?
I don't know telescopes but I know enough about DSP to make me suspect this is gonna need all sorts of fun high performance deconvolution algorithms....
Related projects [0]
Imaging With Nature: Planet Sized Sensors (July 24th, 2010)
Imaging With Nature: A Cloud Based Sun Imager (July 25th, 2010)
A Galaxy Wide Single Pixel Camera (November 6th, 2010)
[0] https://sites.google.com/site/igorcarron/thesetechdonotexist
While forming a complete image is no doubt very cool, just a few fragments of light spectrum would give us incredible insight on its own.
I'm wondering now if with BFR we could pre-place fuel in the slingshot path to get it there quicker and depend less on the Sun gravity slingshot.
For a more critical look at this concept, I recommend "Mission to the Gravitational Focus of the Sun: A Critical Analysis".
https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06351