Artist's concept of the New Worlds Observatory. The dark, flower-shaped object in the center is the star shade. (Credit: NASA and Northrop Grumman)From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2008) — NASA Goddard scientist Rick Lyon has been working on potential missions and technologies to find planets around other stars (called exoplanets or extrasolar planets) since the late 1980s. Only recently has he begun to believe that NASA may actually fly a planet-finding mission in his lifetime.
"This is the closest it’s come to being real," he said.
Lyon and other scientists and engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have joined teams studying optics technologies for three possible exoplanet missions: the Extrasolar Planetary Imaging Coronagraph (EPIC), the New Worlds Observer (NWO), and the eXtrasolar Planet Characterization (XPC) mission.
The possibility of a mission devoted to planet finding is tantalizing, especially to those interested in ratcheting up a science that began 13 years ago when astronomers found and confirmed the existence of the first planet outside the solar system. Since then, scientists have confirmed nearly 300, most of which are gas giants like Jupiter. However, most of these detections have been indirect, because the planets are too faint to be seen directly. Instead, their presence is revealed by measuring how much the unseen world's gravity pulls on its parent star.
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