The Habitable Worlds Observatory is a space based telescope that plans to directly image earth-like planets around sun-like stars, due to launch in the 2040s.
It’s a space telescope that’s set to be the same size as JWST but instead of observing in the infrared, it detects visible and ultraviolet light.
It’ll sit at the stable point Lagrange point 2, just like JWST, around 1.5 million km away from Earth AND the plan is for it to be serviced like the Hubble Space Telescope was by astronauts, but this time by robots. I chatted to Mark Clampin, the Director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA about the plans for this project.
But don’t get too excited though because it’s not set to launch until the 2040s, so how come we’re already talking about it now?