Last summer, NASA opened a new office at the Goddard Space Flight Center dedicated exclusively to design the most ambitious telescope in history.
El Habitable Worlds Observatory. With an investment of 17.5 million dollars only to explore the necessary technologies to materialize it, the HWO is described as a Super Hubble, a new generation space telescope designed to look for extraterrestrial life on other planets.
And we are not talking about planets of the Solar System. This observatory of habitable worlds will be dedicated to looking for biofirms on extra -land planets similar to the earth, the exoplanets that are discovered at a habitable distance of its star.
A huge space telescope. If there is a clear thing is that the HWO will have imposing dimensions. NASA is considering mirrors that could measure between 4 and 15 meters in diameter. A savage compared to 2.4 meters of Hubble and 6.5 meters from James Webb.
A greater magnitude would increase its ability to capture light and details of the exoplanets, but it would also complicate their deployment, taking into account that, like the webb, it will be located 1.5 million kilometers from the earth, in the second point of equilibrium Lagrange gravitational.
Starship, heats you. Bringing such a large telescope to L2 will necessarily require any of the most powerful rockets in the world. Taking into account the rumors of cancellation of the SLS, there are two options:
- New Glenn: The new Blue Origin rocket has a 7 -meter wide cofa, much larger than the standard of 5.4. I could launch the HWO if NASA opted for a compact version of the telescope
- Starship: The highest and most powerful rocket in the world has a 9 -meter load bay. By the time the HWO is ready, Spacex will have the completely operational ship, even with the ability to refuel in orbit to compensate for the enormous use of propellants in takeoff
If the HWO ends up being larger than the James Webb space telescope (which was launched folded in the European rocket Ariane 5), then Starship will be virtually the best option for its deployment.
What can we expect from HWO. Among the instruments planned for the telescope, there will be a very high sensitivity coronographer. It will allow to block the light of the stars to focus on the planets that orbit them.
In addition, it will integrate high -resolution cameras, an advanced spectroscope and a fourth instrument yet to be defined. Unlike the Webb, which focuses on infrared, the HWO will operate on the visible spectrum and cover some ultraviolet and infrared bands, hence it is seen as the spiritual successor of the Hubble telescope.
When will it be ready. According to the most optimistic calculations, around 2034. But taking into account that manufacturing its mirrors will require a precision at the scale of itchometers, we can expect a slow and complex process that perhaps approaches the release date to 2040.
However, the lessons learned from James Webb (which cost 10,000 million dollars and launched after numerous delays) could help reduce cost overruns and postponements of this type of scientific missions. The HWO is not, in fact, a project that just put on the table. It arises from the convergence of previous initiatives such as Habex and Luvoir, and drinks from years of experience in previous missions.
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