We are Buidling ELF to find life…

Ever since Galileo showed us that the planets had surfaces, perhaps like the moon or Earth, we’ve sought to see greater detail on the solar planets. In modern times we’ve done this with powerful telescopes and spacecraft fly-bys but now that we know there are more exoplanets in the sky than distant stars we dream of resolving these alien worlds with detailed surface images. ELF’s iconic mission is to create maps of these exoworlds with sufficient resolution to see oceans, continents, deserts, forests or even alien planetary scale construction or alien mega cities. This is not just a NASA dream, but something that we can plan and execute from the ground during our generation. Relatively new technologies, like machine learning, additive manufacturing, and new optical concepts that we now focus on this one objective, to see alien worlds, will allow us to wake one day to the news that astronomers have found life or even advanced life around a star that is less than 30 light years away.

What’s even more exciting is that this technique is robust. If the data is more or less noisy the effect is relatively benign in that these errors blur the continental boundaries with the exoplanet ocean, but maintain the overall fidelity of the exoplanet image reconstruction. This is illustrated in the figure below.

To solve these problems will require an optical instrument dedicated to this hard problem, and it must make continuous observations of many candidate exoplanet stars for the duration of each exoplanet orbit. For many star  systems this means we could begin to see images after a year of ELF’s ground-based observations or less. The images we get from ELF will change the way we see other planets in the galaxy and will undoubtably change the way we perceive life in the universe and here on Earth.