NASA selected two Baltimore astronomers yesterday to conduct a pair of yearlong studies - one to advance technologies for a powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and the other to design new instruments for other large orbiting observatories.
The Hubble successor - called ATLAS - would have a 52-foot mirror and could become the first telescope to confirm the presence of life on planets outside our solar system, said Marc Postman, 49, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the principal investigator on the $1 million study.
"We certainly may detect an Earth-like planet with another telescope, but ATLAS almost guarantees that you will," he said. "That's the exciting part of it."
The second study, to be led by STScI astronomer Ken Sembach, will examine the feasibility of adding ultraviolet spectrographs to large space telescopes.
It would be a new technology, designed to reveal more of the "cosmic web" of invisible dark matter and gas that cosmologists believe interacts with stars and galaxies to shape the large-scale structure of the universe.
"Our goal is to reduce the cost of future NASA missions by producing novel instrument designs and a roadmap for investments in enabling technologies at ultraviolet wavelengths," Sembach said in a news release on the project. He received about $300,000 from NASA for the work.
The two new studies NASA has assigned to the institute - among 19 NASA has funded with a total of $12 million - could one day lead to NASA contracts to build and fly the hardware.
That would expand the work at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore into the mid-21st century, Postman said. That's well beyond the life of Hubble, or another STScI project, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is set for launch as soon as 2013.
The results will be submitted to the scientific community during the next "decadal survey" that will set priorities for future space science missions.
ATLAS stands for Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space telescope.
Postman's assignment, with the assistance of Northrop Grumman and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., is to identify new materials and optical design problems involved in construction of a 52-foot (16-meter) space telescope.
"If we tried to build ATLAS now, it would cost at least $10 billion," he said, "which is outside anything the NASA budget can currently afford."
But with several key technology breakthroughs, it could conceivably be built at the same cost, adjusted for inflation, as Hubble and the James Webb telescope - about $4 billion in today's dollars.
For that money, scientists would get a telescope with a mirror more than 6 times wider than Hubble's, and 2 1/2 times wider than the Webb telescope.
ATLAS' bigger mirror would yield images eight times clearer than Hubble's, Postman said, "as big an improvement over Hubble as Hubble was over the ground [observatories]."
To get there, however, designers will have to engineer a mirror that weighs just 5 percent of Hubble's for the same area.
If ATLAS' designers can pull it off, astronomers in the 2020s should be able to separate the light of nearby stars from planets orbiting them, and then suppress the star's light to reveal the vastly dimmer light reflected from any Earth-like planets circling them in the "habitable zone."
With spectrographs on board to dissect the chemistry of the planet's atmosphere, scientists could then detect any signs of life.
"If we could find another Earth-like planet with high levels of oxygen or ozone in the atmosphere, that would be very suggestive of a planet that may have biological activity going on, even if we couldn't directly image the planet," Postman said.
If his study succeeds, and NASA eventually gives ATLAS the green light, the observatory could be launched in the 2020s - and hopefully closer to 2020, Postman said, "so I can actually live to see it."
Until then, he said, "Eat well and get plenty of exercise."
frank.roylance@baltsun.com