Space agencies begin countdown to find Earth clone

The world’s major space agencies and a team of more than 1,000 scientists and engineers are already working on a mission aimed at look for signs of life on planets orbiting other stars; They are looking for a clone of Earth.

He Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO, in English) will be a giant telescope designed to search for these signs of life, and although its launch to the site from which it will scan the cosmos is scheduled for the end of the next decade, the sophisticated scientific and technological base required for the mission These functions have already begun be created.

The observatory, according to NASA, will provide powerful capabilities for making astrophysical discoveries, from the “backyard” of the solar system to the farthest universe, and, based on knowledge from several previous space missions, it was specifically designed for identify potentially habitable planets around other stars, closely studying their atmospheres to determine whether life is possible.

The goal is to identify and obtain direct images at least 25 potentially habitable worlds and use modern technologies such as spectroscopy to try to find chemical “biosignatures” in their atmospheres, including gases such as oxygen or methane that could provide fundamental evidence for the existence of life.

The first step was the creation of the Science, Technology and Architecture Review Group (START), which brings together more than 1,000 researchers and engineers from around the world.

In the footsteps of Hubble and James Webb

They joined the NASA mission. Japanese JAXA, Canadian CSA and European Space Agency (ESA)which has already appointed three researchers who will join this team, from which they will coordinate the efforts of the academic world and industry in a project that follows other very iconic projects such as the Hubble or James Webb telescopes.

Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Director of the Space Astronomy Research Group at the Complutense University of Madrid will join this multidisciplinary team representing ESA. Ana Ines Gomez de Castro; David Mouillet from the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of the University of Grenoble (France); and Michelle Min from the Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

The HWO mission will continue over the next few years to try to identify the best candidates for any sign of life, representing one of the most ambitious science and technology projects in decades, but the space observatory will also include instruments to study the chemical evolution of the Universe or formation of planetary systems with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity.

Getting closer to finding life

Gómez de Castro explained to EFE that it is about searching for a “clone of Earth” and discovering planets that, in terms of atmosphere, vegetation or oceans, may be capable of containing life and that are literally “habitable”, and so find molecules of oxygen, ammonia, methane or water this indicated that it was a system similar to that of Earth.

Is man getting closer to finding life in other places? After many decades of space exploration and thanks to the development of modern and emerging technologies, the professor answers categorically: yes; but also that, although this is the main goal of the mission, the science, knowledge and industry that will be devoted to this project will allow us to explore unknown levels.Distribution of dark matter or the origin of galaxies.

Over the next few years, scientists around the world will identify the specific science they want to know and measure before the necessary tools are determined and industry begins to build them.

So it will be a mission that will last for many years, as it was conceived by the US Academy of Sciences and accepted by NASA before its launch at the end of the next decade, but Gómez de Castro has no doubt that it will be “historic” in the knowledge, engineering, technology and funding it will require.

And although she has participated in numerous space projects and missions during her long scientific and teaching career, the professor does not hide the excitement caused by the possibility of finding a “clone” of the Earth: “Imagine the first image of this little blue dot like our Earth, and watch, as it orbits another star.

At the moment, space agencies do not have the necessary technologies and instruments for this, although they are convinced that they will have them in a timely manner, and among the main tasks of the mission they call the need to develop an optical system capable of “covering” a star that can be 100 millions of times brighter than another object (potentially habitable world) located next to it. “And we will definitely get it,” he adds.