In message , Andrew Yee
writes
Office of News Services
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado

Contact:
Webster Cash, (303) 492-4056,
Jim Scott, (303) 492-3114

Sept. 30, 2004

CU Proposal To Image Distant Planets Funded For Further Study By NASA

A NASA institute has selected a new University of Colorado at Boulder
proposal for further study that describes how existing technologies can
be used to study planets around distant stars with the help of an
orbiting "starshade."

The concept by CU-Boulder Professor Webster Cash of the Center for
Astrophysics and Space Astronomy was one of 12 proposals selected for
funding Sept. 28 by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, or NIAC.
Cash's proposal details the methods needed to design and build what
essentially is a giant "pinhole camera" in space.

The football field-sized starshade would be made of thin, opaque
material and contain an aperture, or hole, in the center roughly 30
feet in diameter to separate a distant planet's light from the light of
its adjacent parent star, Cash said. A detector spacecraft equipped
with a telescope would trail tens of thousands of miles behind the
orbiting starshade to collect the light and process it.

In effect, these people are proposing a full-scale solar sail :-)
I wish them luck.