New Worlds Mission
proposed space mission comprising a space telescope and occulter for observing exoplanets
The New Worlds Mission is a proposed project comprising a large occulter flying in formation with a space telescope designed to block the light of nearby stars in order to observe their orbiting exoplanets. The observations could be taken with an existing space telescope or a dedicated visible light optical telescope optimally designed for the task of finding exoplanets. A preliminary research project was funded from 2005 through 2008 by NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) and headed by Webster Cash of the University of Colorado at Boulder in conjunction with Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Northrop Grumman, Southwest Research Institute and others. Since 2010 the project has been looking for additional financing from NASA and other sources in the amount of roughly US$3 billion including its own four-meter telescope. If financed and launched, it would operate for five years.
Purpose
Currently, the direct detection of extrasolar planets (or exoplanets) is extremely difficult. This is primarily due to:
Exoplanets appearing extremely close to their host stars when observed at astronomical distances. Even the closest of stars are several light years away. This means that while looking for exoplanets, one would typically be observing very small angles from the star, on the order of several tens of milli-arcseconds. Angles this small are impossible to resolve from the ground due to astronomical seeing.
The public source identifies “New Worlds Mission” as proposed space mission comprising a space telescope and occulter for observing exoplanets. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Worlds, Mission and proposed.
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This entry incorporates text from “New Worlds Mission” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.