Next month, NASA will open what is perhaps its most ambitious project ever: the Gossamer Spacecraft Initiative, a quest to build a telescope that can make vivid the farthest, faintest, oldest objects in the universe, that will show the fringes of black holes and resolve surface features of planets that orbit other stars.

"The Gossamer telescope is just not going to be an extension of Hubble. It's not going to be an extension of the Next-Generation Space Telescope, which will replace Hubble. It will be something totally different, using different technology -- a totally different system," said Art Chmielewski, the Gossamer Spacecraft Initiative's manager, who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The initiative will be managed jointly by JPL and NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

With $6 million for its first year of operations, the project will begin to fund research, gather the expertise and develop the concepts and technologies that will make possible a massive light collector in space sometime in the next several decades.

The Gossamer initiative will focus on research in two main areas -- solar sails and large-aperature collectors.

Solar sails may have the greatest potential for providing a low-mass source of propulsion. They may also be the element of the Gossamer system that is furthest along in development. Sails would be giant reflecting membranes that would take advantage of the pressure of the sun's light to push a craft through space.

The second area the Gossamer initiative will focus on is developing large, lightweight light-collecting aperatures. Glass is not an option. Even a 1-millimeter layer of glass would weigh several tons when spread out over the huge area of the Gossamer telescope. That says nothing of the structure, the support systems, the power supply or any of the electronics that the telescope would require.

The Gossamer is seeking truly innovative ideas, Chmielewski said.

Ideas already suggested include arrays of reflecting particles that might be aligned by lasers and magnetic fields, he said. Perhaps some kind of liquid mirror would prove feasible.

One way to keep the volume of the spacecraft down is to make almost the entire structure out of a collapsible fabric that could be rolled or folded up during launch and deployed when in space. Instead of the sails or the collector array being attached to a gigantic, rigid metal box that encloses the spacecraft's guts, the necessary instruments might be woven into the fabric of a sail, or the light collector. This is the concept of multi-functional membranes.

"The computer that you're using right now, if we had that kind of a system, you could be wearing it in a T-shirt," Chmielewsky said.

The fabric that acts as a solar sail might also have a thin layer that acts as a battery, he explained. It could have flexible solar cells attached to on one side for producing power, which could be stored in the ultra-thin battery layer. In theory, all the components of the spacecraft could be distributed throughout the fabric. Even tiny light sensors, like the ones used in video cameras, could be embedded in this fabric.

"If you can integrate millions of microchips with active-pixel sensors on them, then in a sense, you can build a fly's eye that's the size of a tennis court. You'd have one huge eye in space, and maybe that's the way to observe things," Chmielewsky said.

Nearly all the details of the giant spacecraft have yet to be worked out. One of the most challenging will be developing techniques to align and control the flexible membranes once these vast pliable sheets make it into space.

"It is just not easy to navigate and move and change the attitude of something that is the size of the Rose Bowl," Chmielewsky said, referring to the Pasadena, Calif. football stadium.

Solar sails are the best understood component of the Gossamer plans. NASA plans to launch a spacecraft to verify some early solar sail technology within four years.

To kick off the project, NASA is convening a two-day workshop Oct. 12 and 13 in Oxnard, Calif. to introduce the program to scientists and engineers and industry.

Although he admits that the challenges of the Gossamer project are enormous, Chmielewsky said they are nothing that can't be overcome.

"What we want to start with is trying to accomplish seemingly impossible things. If it sounds impossible to do, that's what we want to do. We don't want to do things that are evolutionary. That we leave for standard technology programs and industry."