The James Webb Space Telescope only launched recently, but scientists are already plotting a planet-hunting telescope that will help find worlds like our own.
When it comes to building enormous, complex space telescopes, agencies like NASA have to plan far in advance. Even though the James Webb Space Telescope only launched recently, astronomers are already busy thinking about what will come after Webb — and they’ve got ambitious plans.
The next big space telescope to be launched is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2027. It will perform a survey of the sky to estimate how many habitable exoplanets are out there. After that comes the Habitable World Observatory, a planned space telescope that will directly image Earth-like exoplanets around sun-like stars and which should launch around 2040.
“There’s no perfect biomarker signature,” said David Sing of Johns Hopkins University, as we could also look for atoms like methane, and there’s always the possibility of a false positive, “but oxygen is a really important one.” For a telescope like the Habitable Worlds Observatory, that kind of extreme cooling isn’t necessary, which helps to keep the costs down.
Refining these instruments and making them more accurate is not a trivial endeavor. In addition to direct detection, the next generation of space telescopes will also use techniques like radial velocity for identifying exoplanets. And more accurate spectrographs will enable techniques like extreme precision radial velocity, which allows more accurate measurements of the masses of exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars.
But as tempting as it is to imagine a scenario where we build this telescope, find a habitable planet, then immediately detect life, that’s not how this will work, Gaudi said.
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