A Second Instrument On HWO Could Track Down Nearby Earth-Size Planets

Artist's concept of the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Credit - NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio - eMITS/Walt Feimer, eMITS/Jenny McElligott, eMITS/Kim Dongjae, eMITS/Jonathan North, ADNET Systems, Inc./Aaron E. Lepsch, eMITS/Scott Wiessinger, NASA/GSFC/Claire Andreoli, NASA/GSFC/Aki Roberge

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is slated to be the next Great Observatory for the world. Its main focus has been searching for biosignatures in the atmospheres of at least 25 Earth-like exoplanets. However, to do that, it will require a significant amount of effort with only a coronagraph, the currently planned primary instrument, no matter how powerful that coronagraph is. As new paper from Fabien Malbet of the University of Grenoble Alpes and his co-authors suggest an improvement – add a second instrument to HWO’s payload that will be able to astrometrically track planets down to a precision of .5 micro-arcseconds (µas). That would allow HWO to detect Earth-size planets around hundreds of nearby stars – dramatically increasing the number of potential candidates for atmospheric analysis.

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