To do that, astronomers search for near copies of Earth - planets with similar masses and compositions to our home world orbiting sunlike stars at just the right distance to allow for liquid water.īut finding the planet is only the beginning we need to study its atmosphere, looking for biosignatures, which are chemical byproducts of life. The discovery of an Earth 2.0 would be a gold mine, helping us understand how common life is in the universe, and maybe even heralding a discovery that we're not alone. HabExįinding habitable planets is a pretty hot topic in astronomy.
But if it goes through, the mega space telescope will launch sometime in the 2030s. LUVOIR is only in the design phase and is competing with other observatories for priority funding. Astronomers hope this general-purpose telescope could achieve a variety of astronomical science objectives, such as observe the cloud tops of Jupiter with a 15-mile (25 kilometers) resolution and hunt for biosignatures in the atmospheres other planets. The Large Ultraviolet/Optical/Infrared Surveyor ( LUVOIR) is even bigger, with a mirror diameter of about 50 feet (over 15 meters). It's so big that it can't even fit into a single rocket fairing without a really complicated, origami-like folding of its mirror segments. The James Webb Space Telescope is like a souped-up version of the Hubble Space Telescope. An artist's impression of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, formerly known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST).
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