New Worlds Observer

Seeking Earth-like Planets in Our Solar Neighborhood

Does life exist on other worlds?
Is our planet unique? Are we alone in the universe? Recent technological advances will allow us to start answering these questions within a decade.

The New Worlds Observer (NWO), in development by Northrop Grumman, is a mission using an external coronagraph, or “starshade,” to study planetary systems around the closest stars.

Hundreds of exoplanets have been discovered, but they are generally quite close to their parent star, while planets resembling Earth, Venus, and Mars would have the best chance to be hospitable to life as we know it. In addition, most of the known exoplanets have been discovered by indirect means. The next breakthrough will come with direct imaging and spectroscopy of a planet in the “habitable zone” around a nearby star – something that NWO is designed to do.

The starshade advantage
The innovative starshade concept uses a large screen, shaped like a daisy and taller than a 15-story building, to allow a companion space telescope to detect extrasolar planets around stars less than 50 light years from Earth.

The starshade is needed to block the light of the host star and reveal its planets. For example, from a distance of 10 parsecs (33 light years), our Sun would outshine the Earth by a factor of 10 billion and would be only 0.1 arcsecond (1/36,000th of a degree) away, making the planet impossible to view. The starshade solves this problem by suppressing the light from a star by more than 1010, while leaving the planet visible to the telescope. To do both these things at once, it must be placed tens of thousands of kilometers from the 4-meterclass telescope.

Technology development
The starshade technology is one of the top candidates for a flagship-level mission in the next decade and a top Astro2010 priority for technology development. Northrop Grumman leads the mission and system design for NWO and is developing the design, requirements, and error budget for the starshade using detailed computer simulations.

Laboratory tests have been conducted with scale-model occulters to prove that the starshade functions as expected. Component hardware has been built to determine the state of-the-art capability to produce the required structure.