Hubble's immediate successor is NASA's $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is due to launch in 2018.
According to an April 16 Discovery News online report, plans are in the works to replace the Hubble Space Telescope with bigger and more powerful telescopes with the ultimate goal of searching for extrasolar life beyond the Earth’s galactic neighborhood.
Mario Livio, an astrophysicist based at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, which operates Hubble’s science program, believes that the even though the Hubble will likely be able to keep studying the heavens for at least five more years, he says it’s now time to start planning out a future space telescope that will tackle the next big frontier in space science – to search for signs of life beyond the Earth’s neck of the cosmic woods.
“Hubble has taught us that to answer the most intriguing questions in astrophysics, we must think big and put scientific ambition ahead of budgetary concerns,” he wrote in a commentary piece published online today (April 15) in the Journal Nature. “In my view, the next priority should be the search for life beyond our solar system,” Livio added. “A powerful space telescope that can spot biological signatures in the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets would be a worthy successor.”
Hubble’s immediate successor is NASA’s $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is due to launch in 2018. The infrared-optimized JWST will be able to study the atmospheres of some nearby planets discovered by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, which NASA aims to launch in 2017.
Discovery News reported that NASA is also developing a potential space-telescope mission called WFIRST/AFTA (short for Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope–Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets). WFIRST/AFTA, which could launch around 2024 if it gets the final go-ahead, would continue the hunt for biosignatures among several other major tasks.
However, Livio has something more ambitious in mind: A space telescope with a primary mirror at least 39 feet (12 meters) wide, with vision 25 times sharper than that of Hubble. He said he’s not advocating any particular design for such a space telescope.
