Daves Blog

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — When a boy named Elliott found an alien in the classic 1982 film "E.T." it offered easy answer to the question on every astronomer's mind: Are we alone in the universe? In reality, however, scientists have yet to solve that query.

That could soon change, thanks to a new NASA flagship telescope being designed to seek out strange new worlds that could support life as we know it. Called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, the telescope is so massive it may even need to ride a next-gen megarocket like SpaceX's Starship to reach space; it will also require new technological innovations to hunt for Earth's twin across the light-years. Yet, even with such hefty demands, this project was tapped as a top priority for NASA in the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 (Astro2020), an influential report that aims to set a roadmap for the astronomy community within the decade following its release.

"The question 'Are we alone?' is one of the most significant questions, not just in the history of science, but in the history of humanity, and we are at the precipice of actually having the tools and technologies that are required to tackle this question in a rigorous and scientific fashion," Giada Arney, the interim project scientist for the Habitable Worlds Observatory, told a crowd of scientists during a plenary talk here at the 245th American Astronomical Society meeting on Wednesday (Jan. 15). "We might learn the answer to this question within our lifetimes, and the answer to that question is a discovery, the implications of which would ripple through future millennia."