One of NASA's biggest medium-range goals is the Terrestrial Planet Finder (web page).

This is a mission to search for terrestrial -- Earth-like -- planets orbiting other stars. In particular, Earth-like planets in their stars' habitable zones are the goal.

http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~smyers/astrogif/

The technique used is called interferometry -- combining the light from several different telescopes to make one very high resolution image.

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