https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-wants-to-photograph-the-surface-of-an-exoplanet/

It wasn’t that long ago that the only known planets in our galaxy were those orbiting our own sun. But over the past few decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets and concluded that they outnumber the stars in our galaxy. Many of these alien worlds have fantastic properties such as planet-wide oceans of lava or clouds that rain iron. Others may have conditions strikingly similar to Earth. We’ll never be able to travel to these distant worlds to see for ourselves, but an audacious mission to interstellar space may allow us to admire them from afar.

Last week, NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concept program announced its new cohort of scientists who will spend the next year developing space mission concepts that sound like they were plucked straight from science fiction. Among this year’s NIAC grants are proposals to turn a lunar crater into a giant radio dish, to develop an antimatter deceleration system, and to map the inside of an asteroid. But the most eye-popping concept of the bunch was advanced by Slava Turyshev, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who wants to photograph an exoplanet by using the sun as a giant camera lens.