NASA funds development for the life-hunting Habitable Worlds Observatory

A central component of NASA’s science work is to help answer whether life has emerged elsewhere in the cosmos. So far, NASA has been looking tentatively in our own backyard – the Solar System – for signs that Earth may be just one of many homes to life. There are, however, a number of other stellar systems in the Milky Way with planets that life could call home, and NASA aims to search those planets for the markers of life with a concept mission called the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO).

To carry out its objectives, the HWO – a proposed infrared, optical and ultraviolet space telescope – will need brand-new technologies, and NASA recently selected three proposals that will help deliver the tech necessary for searching for life outside of the Solar System. “It will be a historically ambitious mission, so we are taking a deliberate, strategic approach to its development and laying the groundwork now,” Mark Clampin, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said. “We will need to bring together diverse expertise from government, academia and industry while building on technologies and lessons learned.”

Part of the mission’s aims will be to directly image 25 potentially habitable exoplanets around stars that are similar to our Sun and to use spectrographic analysis to study the chemical components of these worlds’ atmospheres in the hopes of detecting chemical signatures that we associate with life.