They know a planet’s mass or its size - they know both only in serendipitous cases - and the distance between it and the star it orbits. In 2009, the Kepler spacecraft opened the floodgates, and hundreds and then thousands of exoplanets poured onto the scene.īut astronomers know only the slimmest of details for most of these planets. Over the next decade, searches from both the ground and space revealed a handful more, then dozens. In 1995, exoplanets catapulted from science fiction to cutting-edge science when Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first one orbiting a solar-type star. From this pristine vantage point, it will peer into the farthest reaches of the cosmos and hunt the holy grail of astronomy: another living Earth. It will command an uninterrupted and unclouded view of the heavens, far from Earth’s atmosphere or its photobombing bulk. And while earthbound telescopes will have advanced to 30 meters by HDST’s era, the space telescope will, like JWST before it, fly not just in space, but at the distant L2 Lagrange point, well beyond the moon’s orbit. JWST’s 6.5-meter mirror already dwarfs Hubble’s comparatively modest 2.4 meters, but HDST will span about 12 meters, matching the largest telescopes currently on Earth. While JWST will focus specifically on the infrared portion of the spectrum, HDST will be a true Hubble successor, with capabilities in the infrared, optical, and ultraviolet. So, balanced between technologies within reach and the most pressing astrophysics questions of the day, the basics are already apparent to Seager and her fellow visionaries. “You have your science drivers and your engineering constraints, and you try to find a happy medium among all of those.” She was also a co-chair for the committee tasked by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) to define a vision for HDST. “There’s not a million ways to do it,” says Sara Seager, astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since the moment Hubble left the launchpad, different groups have discussed what this future project might look like, but they all agree on the basic requirements and objectives.
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