ExoLife Finder

hideThis article has multiple issues. Please help or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (November 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) This article relies too much on references to primary sources. Please improve this by adding secondary or tertiary sources. (November 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Adaptive optics

The ExoLife Finder Telescope (ELF) is a proposed hybrid interferometric telescope intended to directly detect and image the surface of potentially Earth-like planets.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

The telescope, which was proposed by the PLANETS Foundation, consists of an array of telescopes arranged in a circle from a parent parabola. Each telescope has primary and secondary adaptive mirrors.^[6][7][8]

These mirrors form a common image with the resolution equivalent to the diameter of the array.^[9][10][11]

The ELF is designed with the use of light-weight mirrors and tensegrity-based mechanical support, which makes it scalable, affordable, and rapidly buildable within 3–4 years.^[12][13]

To image the surface of, for example, Proxima b, the array should be at least 12 meters in diameter. A 20m array would be able to image dozens of exoplanets in the Solar neighborhood.^{[1][citation needed]}

References[]