![]() ![]() "We kind of came up with a new way of evaluating and developing missions," says Harrison. On Earth, it would weigh 24,500 pounds (11,110 kilograms). The James Webb Space Telescope, however, ran years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget - and astronomers want to avoid a repeat of that experience. Hubble is 43.5 feet (13.2 meters) wide with a maximum diameter of 14 feet (4.2 m). Previous "decadal surveys" endorsed efforts that ultimately became NASA's Hubble Space Telescope as well as the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch December 18. ![]() These kinds of recommendations, which are produced with help and input from hundreds of astronomers, carry serious weight with Congress and government officials. "We decided that what would be right is something in between the two." The panel did consider two proposals, called HabEx and LUVOIR, that focused on planets around far-off stars, but ultimately decided that LUVOIR was too ambitious and HabEx wasn't ambitious enough, says Harrison. This telescope would cost an estimated $11 billion, and could launch in the early 2040's. Such a telescope would be able gather infrared, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths, in order to observe a planet that's 10 billion times fainter than its star and learn about the make-up of its atmosphere, to search for combinations of gases that might indicate life. Space If NASA greenlights this interstellar mission, it could last 100 years A just-right telescope for 'Goldilocks Zone' planets That's why the expert panel's "top recommendation for a mission," says Harrison, was a telescope significantly larger than the Hubble Space Telescope that would be capable of blocking out a star's bright light in order to capture the much dimmer light coming from a small orbiting planet. "In the last decade, we've uncovered thousands of planets around other stars," says Harrison, including rocky planets that orbit stars in the so called "Goldilocks Zone" where temperatures are not too hot and not too cold for liquid water and possibly life. "The most amazing scientific opportunity ahead of us in the coming decades is the possibility that we can find life on another planet orbiting a star in our galactic neighborhood," says Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at Caltech who co-chaired the committee that wrote the report. Every ten years, at the request of government science agencies including NASA, this independent group of advisors reviews the field of astronomy and lays out the top research priorities going forward. That's according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Happy woman holding huge tourists binocular Happy woman holding huge tourists binocular and looking far ahead. Radio astronomy an interferometer antenna. NASA should work towards building a giant new space telescope that's optimized for getting images of potentially habitable worlds around distant stars, to see if any of them could possibly be home to alien life. Big radio telescope on a hills, with night starry sky and time lapse star trails from Earth moving. Astronomers say the next big telescope should be designed to search signs of life on planets that orbit distant stars. Technicians work on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which will launch in December. ![]()
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