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NASA to Proceed on Two Approaches for Planet Finder
By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 05:22 pm ET
10 May 2002
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NASA announced today that research would proceed on two methods of studying Earth-like planets around other stars NASA announced today that research would proceed on two methods of studying Earth-like planets around other stars. The chosen mission architectures would be part of a future mission called Terrestrial Planet Finder, or TPF. Each approach would use a different means to achieve the same goal -- to block the light from a parent star in order to study planets that would be billions of times dimmer, according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The TPF mission, which has not been slated firmly nor funded, would launch in the middle of the next decade if it survives future rounds of approval processes. The mission would seek to characterize the surfaces and atmospheres of newfound planets and look for the chemical signatures of life. In one architecture, called an infrared interferometer, multiple small telescopes on a fixed structure or on separated spacecraft flying in precision formation would simulate a much larger, very powerful telescope. Interferometry has been done on the ground successfully, but no one has figured out how to do it in space. In another NASA project, called StarLight, engineers are already building an early prototype, involving a pair of telescopes, that could fly in the next few years and would serve as a testbed for the technology.The other architecture, called a visible light coronagraph, would be a large optical telescope that blocks out starlight but lets light from around the star come in. The mirror would be three to four times larger and at least 10 times more precise than the one on the Hubble Space Telescope, engineers said. Planning for the Terrestrial Planet Finder project is led by JPL. More than 60 designs were considered prior to the decision announced today. The agency expects one of the two architectures to be selected by 2006. In 2007, NASA has firm plans to launch Kepler, a less ambitious telescope that would nonetheless seek to detect the first Earth-sized planets around other stars. Kepler would not provide pictures of those planets, however, nor could it study their atmosphere.
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