A NASA-led team is hoping to take a short cut in directly imaging extrasolar earthlike planets. The idea is to use what they term a hybrid telescope composed of an orbital starshade coupled with the next generation of extremely large ground-based optical telescopes.
Positioned some 175,000km away in an elliptical Earth orbit, the starshade would likely first be used in conjunction with the European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope, now scheduled to see scientific first light in northern Chile by late 2030.
The starshade would block out the parent star's light to enable directly imaged optical observations of nearby solar systems and rocky earth-sized worlds. That is, planetary systems all located within some twenty light years of Earth.
Dubbed the Hybrid Observatory for Earth-like Exoplanets (HOEE), the team has already applied for Phase B NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts) funding that they hope to see granted by 2027.
Current direct imaging space instruments, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Camera and NASA’s planned Roman Space Telescope’s Coronagraph Instrument, are unable to directly observe earth-like exoplanets, write the authors of a 2026 paper appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Source: Universe Today
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