Hosted by Tony Darnell.

From September 8, 2023.

There’s no question that humanity is making fast progress in understanding, cataloging and classifying planets around other stars. So far we’ve found over five thousand five hundred of them. But let’s face it, we really want to know, maybe more than anything else, whether these planets have any life on them and whether they are habitable for us to, maybe, live on.

 

Finding habitable worlds has been a driving passion since we first learned there were other planets out there, and to find them, we are going to need a dedicated instrument that does nothing else but tries to locate and characterize them.

 

That’s where the Habitable Worlds Observatory comes in. NASA says  “HWO is a concept for a NASA flagship mission, as recommended by the 2020 Astrophysics Decadal Survey, that would pursue a breadth of astrophysics goals, including searching for and characterizing potentially habitable planets beyond our solar system.”

 

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