The Habitable Worlds Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope with Dr. Jane Rigby #SpaceSaturday
This past weekend some Adafruit folks were lucky enough to attend a talk from Dr. Jane Rigby, who serves as Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. Dr. Rigby’s address served as the keynote speech in the inaugural Tinsley Workshop series, hosted by the Yale Department of Astronomy.
Dr. Rigby went deep on some of the discoveries made by the JWST team and then took questions from the audience. One audience member asked whether or not the JWST is being used to search for alien life. Dr. Rigby pointed out that the JWST is not specifically designed to search for alien life. However, NASA is currently developing the tantalizingly named Habitable Worlds Observatory. Here’s more from NASA:
Currently referred to as the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), this is a concept for a mission that would search for and characterize habitable planets beyond our solar system. Building upon studies conducted for two earlier mission concepts called the Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR) and Habitable Exoplanets Observatory (HabEx), HWO would be designed specifically to identify potentially habitable planets around other stars, closely examining their atmospheres to determine if life could possibly exist.
The mission’s main objective would be to identify and directly image at least 25 potentially habitable worlds. It would then use spectroscopy to search for chemical “biosignatures” in these planets’ atmospheres, including gasses such as oxygen and methane which could serve as critical evidence for life. The observatory would introduce new capabilities to study the universe with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution, giving us important new insights into the evolution of cosmic structures, including how galaxies form and develop over time.
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