LIFE Nulling Interferometer (2D): Rotating Baseline Fringe Map

The LIFE mission concept (Large Interferometer For Exoplanets) is a proposed fleet of four free-flying space telescopes that combine their thermal-infrared light through destructive interference to null out a target star by a factor of thousands, revealing the far fainter light of an orbiting rocky planet directly. This 2D top-down simulator lays out the four-collector X-array formation, rotates the baseline over time — or by hand, drag the array view — while three linked panels show the live geometry, the sin² fringe-transmission heatmap in the array's own (u,v) frame, and the resulting periodic rise and fall of the planet's transmitted signal once per rotation: the same modulation trick used to separate a real biosignature detection from noise and from abiotic false positives like photolysis-driven oxygen.