While Origins technologists are incredibly skilled, that idea poses absolutely mind-numbing technical challenges. That question alone is compelling enough to spark creativity, leading us to a new approach that we hope will bring exciting answers. Interferometry With this hope in mind, the Origins Program is working on another way to create the power of extremely large telescopes. It's a technique called interferometry. The name makes it sound incredibly complicated, but it's not really hard to understand.
Light comes in the form of waves, which go up and down much as waves rise and fall in the ocean.
When we combine light from two widely separated mirrors, the light from each overlaps. A pattern of light and dark bands is the result, depending on where the crests and troughs of each light wave falls in relation to one another. The interference pattern ends up looking kind of like a bar code at your supermarket. Star Light Interferometry offers a huge advantage to the Origins program in its planet-finding quest. Our future space telescopes such as Terrestrial Planet Finder and Planet Imager will use interferometry to cancel out the the light of the central star, while letting the faint light from the tiny planets come through.