The James Webb Space Telescope will give us new discoveries of exoplanets. In the mean time, work will continue on the idea of using the gravitational field of the sun as a cosmic telescope. This article from “The Scientific American” entitled, “Using the Sun as a Cosmic Telescope,” gives this exciting new understanding:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/using-the-sun-as-a-cosmic-telescope/
Thanks for posting. Didn’t realize an Einstein Ring might only be a single pixel of the image you were trying to capture and that you would have to fly your spacecraft in a spiral loop around the sun’s focal line to see the whole image. Holy cow! The mind boggles at the image processing work your computers will have to do. Glad I don’t have to do it by hand!