Astronomy missions involving CU-Boulder selected for further study by NASA

Artist concepts of a CU-Boulder starshade and orbiting space telescope that would zoom in on light from distant planets, (left) and a Naval Observatory Proposal involving CU-Boulder to place a... Click here for more information.

NASA has awarded the University of Colorado at Boulder $1 million to lead the study of a space observatory to find Earth-like planets in distant solar systems and open the search for life outside our solar system.

A second proposal from the Naval Research Laboratory involving CU-Boulder also was selected for $500,000 in NASA funding. The proposal would place a low-frequency radio telescope on the far side of the moon to probe the first structures that formed in the early universe.

The CU-Boulder planetary proposal, called the New Worlds Observer, was one of 19 proposals for major new observatories in the coming decade selected for further study. The New Worlds Observer proposal features a giant, daisy-shaped plastic "starshade" to block starlight and allow a telescope to image the faint light from distant planets circling other stars, said Professor Webster Cash, chief scientist on the effort.

Astronomers will, for the first time, be able to identify planetary features like oceans, continents, polar caps and cloud banks and even detect biomarkers like methane, oxygen and water if they exist, said Cash, who is chair of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department. The 4-meter telescope planned for the project will be larger and more powerful than the 2.4-meter mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope, allowing researchers to record the light from rocky planets tens of trillions of miles away.