With the Hubble Space Telescope aging and Kepler crippled, leading astronomers are mounting a new push for the construction of a telescope so huge that it may need to be constructed by astronauts in space rather than being launched aboard a single rocket.
The Advanced Technologies Large Aperture Space Telescope (ATLAST) is a concept for a space telescope with a mirror as large as 20 meters across — nearly ten times that of Hubble’s primary mirror — that NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute and others have been developing for several years now. But the project has taken a backseat to the next generation James Webb Space Telescope, which is set to launch as soon as 2018.
“The time is right for scientific and space agencies around the world, including those in the UK, to take a bold step forward and to commit to this project,” Barstow said in a statement promoting a talk scheduled for Tuesday in Portsmouth, UK that will cover ATLAST’s potential for detecting hints of life in other solar systems.
Contrary to other published reports, Barstow will not be revealing the details of ATLAST for the first time, as the concept has been around for several years now in one form or another. He will also not be announcing NASA’s plans to undertake construction of ATLAST, given that such a project appears nowhere in the space agency’s latest budget estimates, released in March (those estimates do include several hundred million dollars for the James Webb Telescope, however.)
According to the statement, ATLAST could be launched as soon as 2030 to succeed the Webb telescope and provide unprecedented “life-finding” capabilities:
It would be capable of analysing the light from planets the size of the Earth in orbit around other nearby stars, searching for features in their spectra such as molecular oxygen, ozone, water and methane that could suggest the presence of life. It might also be able to see how the surfaces of planets change with the seasons.