An artist's concept of exoplanet Kepler 1649c, one of the closest Earth size, Earth temperate worlds found so far. It's the difference between trying to spot a firefly next to a lighthouse, and actually managing to switch the lighthouse off. But that's rather the point of NIAC, to give genuinely ambitious ideas room to be explored before anyone commits real money to building them. If something like this ever did fly, it would mark the moment exoplanet science stopped simply proving worlds exist, and started actually mapping them. Source : Mapping Alien Continents: Achieving Optical VLBI for Exoplanet Imaging