Technicians are working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which will launch in December. Astronomers say that the next large telescope should be designed to look for signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars. Alex Wong/Getty Images hide caption

Technicians are working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which will launch in December. Astronomers say that the next large telescope should be designed to look for signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars.

NASA should work hard to build a huge new space telescope that is optimized to take images of the potentially habitable world around distant stars to see if it might be home to alien life.

This is a conclusion based on a new report from the National Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Engineering, and the School of Medicine. Every ten years, at the request of government scientific agencies, including NASA, this independent advisory group will review the field of astronomy and list the top research priorities for the future.

Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, who is the co-chair of the committee, said: “The most amazing scientific opportunity before us in the next few decades is that we have It is possible to find life on another planet orbiting a nearby star in the Milky Way." report.

Harrison said: "In the past ten years, we have discovered thousands of planets orbiting other stars," including rocky planets orbiting stars in the so-called "Goldilocks zone," where the temperature is relative to liquid water. Life is neither too hot nor too cold.

Harrison said this is why the panel’s "missionary recommendation" is a telescope much larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, which can block the bright light from the star to capture the darker light from a small orbit. planet.

Such a telescope will be able to collect infrared, optical and ultraviolet wavelengths in order to observe planets 10 billion times dimmer than their stars and understand the composition of their atmospheres to find combinations of gases that may indicate the existence of life. The telescope is estimated to cost 11 billion U.S. dollars, It may be launched in the early 2040s.

Harrison said the team did consider two proposals called HabEx and LUVOIR, which focused on planets around distant stars, but ultimately decided that LUVOIR was too ambitious and HabEx was not ambitious enough. "We decided that what was right was something in between."

These suggestions were produced with the help and input of hundreds of astronomers and are of great significance to Congress and government officials. The previous "Decade Survey" recognized the efforts that would eventually become NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope scheduled for launch on December 18.

However, the James Webb Space Telescope was operating several years later than planned and exceeded its multi-billion dollar budget-astronomers hope to avoid repeating the same mistakes. "We came up with a new way of evaluating and developing tasks," Harrison said.

Other primary research priorities identified by the team include understanding black holes and neutron stars, as well as the origin and evolution of galaxies.

The team suggested that at some point in the middle of this century, NASA should start working on two other space telescopes: a very high-resolution X-ray mission and a far-infrared mission. The team considered several designs called Lynx and Origins, but ultimately decided that a lower-priced instrument ($3 billion or $4 billion) would be more appropriate.

"When we saw the large projects before us, we were very excited about them," said Rachel Osten, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute who served on the expert committee. "We are grateful for all the work done to get them to the stage they are in."

But all of these are still very early concepts, Osten said, and because more research needs to be done to understand the cost and technology, “what we do is determine what our first mission on the ground and in space is,” not rather than Rank task proposals or adopt a winner-takes-all approach.

"There is no winner," she said. "I think everyone will win because of this."

After all, Osten said, 20 years ago, researchers hardly knew about any planets outside our solar system, and now astronomers have developed their science to the point where “we have a way to start answering this question, are we alone?”