NASA plans to build a Telescope to explore deep space and perhaps find signs of life on other planets. The "HabEx" is a direct-imaging planetary telescope that aims to search for signs of habitability, and perhaps alien life on exoplanets.
Scientists claimed that here are 4,706 candidate planets outside Earth's solar system thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope. Well, scientists revealed that they plan to search for exoplanets that aren't too far from Earth.
The special telescope was designed to capture images of young planets in the early stages of formation to provide an insight on the evolution of solar systems. This mission aims to assess the prevalence of habitable planets, atmosphere and surface conditions of exoplanets.
Direct-imaging method resembles photography. Although, besides capturing photos, it also acquires a lot of information about exoplanets including its orbit, atmospheric composition and the possibility that it has clouds.
"Even if every single sunlike star has an Earth, you have to burn through a lot of those to get a transit detection. If you can image the system, and every single sunlike star has an Earth, you only need to burn through one," Thayne Currie, a research associate at Subaru Telescope, says.
"To me, [direct detection] means something fundamentally more special," he added.
Aside from HabEx, NASA plans to launch three more specialized telescopes of varying purposes. For instance, astronomers and scientists are looking forward to building a large ultraviolet, optical and infrared (LUVOIR) telescope.
At present, Hubble Space Telescope has contributed a lot in terms of space observation. Imagine this type of telescope has a 7.9-foot-wide (2.4 meters) primary mirror that have shown humans a lot about the cosmos. The LUVOIR, however, will have a 39-foot (12 meters) mirror.
X-ray telescopes helped scientists study various space objects and phenomenon, including supernovas, black holes, mysterious dark matter and galaxies. NASA plans to build a new X-ray surveyor telescope that can shed light on how matter behaves in some extreme environments and the evolution of supermassive black holes.
Lastly, NASA plans to execute Far-IR surveyor mission, which is a next-generation far-infrared space telescope. It was built for astronomers to study the birth of cosmic bodies in detail. It can also identify chemicals that are present in distant cosmic objects.
These missions, however, are yet to be selected in the future. The four concept groups involved in the development of the missions will work to provide a decadal survey that will contain all the information needed in order to choose which mission will become a reality.
