New space observatory to search for Earth-like planets

Experts from Johns Hopkins partner with others from academia, government, and industry to build a “super Hubble” to search for other life in the cosmos

While myth and science may seem in conflict with each other, Jessie Christiansen is fascinated by the narratives humans have spun about stars and constellations.

“It’s incredibly beautiful and poignant that the oldest stories we have—the stories humanity has been telling ourselves for tens of thousands of years—are stories about the sky and what it can tell us about where we come from and where we’re going,” she said.

Christiansen, the chief scientist of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology, is now a core part of the team developing a new space telescope, known as the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which will be the first telescope engineered to travel the galaxy to identify life and habitable planets around other stars.

She joined dozens of other astronomers, engineers, and scientists across a range of disciplines and sectors at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center recently to discuss the development and potential of this next-generation NASA mission.

Building on former NASA tech advancements

The Habitable Worlds Observatory, or HWO, which doesn’t yet have a formal launch date, will build on the success of the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, as well as the technology in the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will launch by May 2027.

Key to HWO’s success will be building an advanced coronagraph, a device that can block out direct light from stars so that objects that would normally be hidden by the glare, such as planets, are visible. Each new space telescope from NASA has included a stronger coronagraph than the observatory before it, which allows it to capture clearer, more detailed images than its predecessor.

To find new planets near a sun-like star, HWO will need an even stronger coronagraph than the one in Roman, a challenge that engineers and researchers are working to meet now.

“We have to understand novel technologies that can get us to the sensitivity levels we need, because every scrap of sensitivity we can win makes the mission more possible,” said Bruce Macintosh, the director of the University of California Observatories.

Answers in space, advancements on Earth

While HWO’s launch is several years away, the mission’s collaborators are optimistic that with the cutting-edge telescope, it will be possible to answer the age-old question of “Are we alone in the universe?”

“We don’t know exactly when it will be, we don’t know exactly who it will be, but I think it seems inevitable now that the exploration of Mars, and possibly beyond in the solar system, will happen in our life,” said Jason Tumlinson, research scientist in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Johns Hopkins and astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Macintosh echoed Tumlinson and stressed the potentially transformative nature of the HWO mission.

“Ultimately, discovering that we’re not the only life in our neighborhood really would be something that we’re allowed to compare to Copernicus and to Galileo,” Macintosh said. “And we know how to build a machine that will do this. There are a few engineering details to work out, but we know that it’s possible.”

The impacts of this mission aren’t limited to space, experts said.

“Industries tend to pick up this technical innovation and run with it and create amazing things for humanity,” said Evgenya Shkolnik, professor of astrophysics at Arizona State University.

This work also supports future scientists and engineers in the U.S.

“The next generation of engineers and problem-solvers will work on medical imaging, for instance,” said Dimitri Mawet, professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. “They will also invent new ways to monitor assembly lines of microchips using the same technologies that they applied and learned or invented in astronomy.”