LUVOIR Telescope Will Discover New Planets Better Than Earth

 

With the James Webb space telescope still hurtling towards its destination and NASA basking in the glow of what so far has been an almost perfect journey it's still not too early to look ahead for Webb's eventual successor after all it took decades to plan engineer and finally get Webb and its wondrous gold-plated mirror into space so as the scientific world is just beginning to unwrap the incredible gift to humanity that is Webb and preparing for the mid-2020s launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope let's take a look at what may come next just a hint it's spectacular welcome to Science Reads in today's article we unveil NASA's concept for the most advanced astronomical observatory in human history its remarkable mission and likely timeline buckle up as we peer into the future at

 the next generation of technical marvels in 2016 as web was still being developed and tested nasa began study of four concepts for its next flagship mission of which three heavily focused on exponentially expanding humanity's knowledge of habitable worlds one of these has captured the imaginations of astronomers and scientists the world over introducing the large ultraviolet optical infrared surveyor also known as Luvoir this is nasa's most ambitious concept for a space observatory to succeed web with a multi-wavelength upgradable space facility that like web will orbit at Lagrange point 2 or l2 currently two designs are on the drawing board blue var a with a 15 meter or 49-foot mirror and Luvoir b featuring an 8 meter

 or 26-foot mirror the louvre team

 jokingly refers to them as large and

 really large versions of the design

 for perspective house 6 times the size of Hubble's mirror and over twice as large as webs picture a ferris wheel that's Luvoir a whose mirror is the maximum size able to fit even folded inside the next generation of heavy lift rockets make no mistake the Luvoir science and technology definition team is building on the marvelous advances made by webs developers including using the space origami design of segmented mirrors that unfold and deploy in space and its purpose yes astronomers have confirmed the existence of almost 5 000 exoplanets so what do we really know about them we know that some are bigger than others and that some are hotter than others some are gas giants like Jupiter and some are small and rocky worlds more like mars we have pretty good ideas of radius mass and density of sun yeah we know very little one researcher referred to these exoplanets as small black shadows just knowing they exist is a great start but most have been detected by astronomers through indirect means such as studying the effects of their passing between their star's disk and earth so no direct observation and precious little to tell us what they're made of what kind of atmosphere if any they possess and most importantly if they are capable of sustaining life as we conceive it to be Luvoir tends to change that in a hurry its focus will be earth-like worlds observing to see how common the conditions that

 exist on our home are in the universe

 and much more we cannot even anticipate think about how different planets within our own solar system are from each other as many a scientist has said before we don't know what we don't know what we do know is that our knowledge of planets outside our solar system will grow leaps and bounds as aki roberge astronomer and the study scientist for the Luvoir decadal survey mission concept study says success in this endeavor would be the birth of a brand new field of comparative astrobiology so how Luvoir if completed

 determine whether other worlds can sustain life get ready for the eclipse coronagraph even with the incredibly large mirror design of Luvoir a the issue of getting optimal views of exoplanets with their nearby stars glare to contend with doesn't go away but it does with eclipse the extreme coronagraph for living planetary systems works somewhat like our moon does when it eclipses the sun blocking the overwhelming glare and allowing spectacular views of solar flares an advanced version of this technology is being flown into space first on board the roman telescope mission for a demonstration once the blinding light is blocked an imaging camera can determine which worlds are rocky and which are gaseous then the spectrograph goes to work identifying elements such as molecular oxygen ozone carbon dioxide water vapor and methane do these sound familiar in an important way Luvoir is more of a successor to hubble than to webb or roman like hubble and unlike the more recent two Luvoir will take in a broader array of wavelengths from ultraviolet and visible light to the infrared thus its unique ability to look for the molecular building blocks of life and indicators of biological processes john o'mear chief scientist of the keck observatory and member of the Luvoir concept team says what we are trying to do with Luvoir is create an observatory that can tell the story of the universe from its earliest formation to the widespread presence or absence of life extrapolating what astronomers know from data gathered by NASA's Kepler survey mission combined with Luvoir's capabilities the study team predicts the observatory may identify and study 54 worlds like earth over a five-year period that's not to mention many hundreds of larger and different planets you could think a long time and not come up with a more ambitious goal for astronomers the reality is however that not everyone in the political process will be enamored with searching for other worlds capable of sustaining life for this reason instrumentation proposed for Luvoir is flexible and very significantly plays well with others astronomers will be able to see our solar system neighbors in ways previously impossible without sending a spacecraft there icy moons on fringe outer planets may even be monitored for geysers of water erupting from their frozen surfaces and beyond our cosmic backyard Luvoir will expand our knowledge of even the remotest and dimmest galaxies light years beyond what we know today with its capability for unprecedented observations of faint spectra from the early days after the big bang astronomers will be able to identify where specific galaxies are in the cosmological evolutionary process add to that the ability to see imprints of dark matter and it's no wonder why astronomers even with web racing 2l2 and roman inching closer to launch are excited about the next generation of space telescopes waiting to go up by the way when can we dare hope to see this mission off the ground and into space the proposed launch date is in the mid-2030s so what do you think about Luvoir and humanity's possible next step towards perhaps the most important question space exploration seeks to answer whether we are alone in the universe will policymakers see it in the same light as the scientific world tell us in the comments