One Search for Planets in The Alpha_Centauri System is: Project Blue. https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/project-blue-aims-to-snap-the-first-picture-of-an-exoplanet-in-alpha-centauri/
WordPress article on Space Telescope built to image another planet, a world's first. DS 12/14/16
Project Blue (@proj_blue) tweeted at 1:49 PM on Dec 04:
Interested in the science of imaging Earth-like #exoplanets? See this @reddit_AMA w NASA scientists doing just that:
Project Blue is a Kickstarter, crowd funding campaign to finance plans to build an orbiting telescope capable of imaging a planet in the AlphaCenturi star system, a first. No telescope, however large, has yet done that.
It will employ nested lenses capable of being focused by warping, and also of blocking the intense light of a star, 4.37 light years away, in order to see the dim planet.
So far, Kickstarter has received 1,000 donations, and that was the first number to tackle. Now Project Blue has gone beyond that.
It appears their next goal include building a starship that can get there in 40 years instead of 10’s of thousands. That’s would be at approximately 1/10 the the speed of light!
This starship may only include machinery, sensors computers and a radio, as well as propulsion and antenna, and not include people. Since it took 9.5 years for a conventional spacecraft to reach Pluto, the idea of a non-conventional positron-electron powered ship to reach the nearest star in 40 years is a real jump in propulsion invention and may have barriers to overcome. This idea of a new way is not uncommon in America, we invent news ways all the time. Kickstarter and Project Blue and are standing on the edge of reality, both in devices and present knowledge. David Schaedler 12/6/16