![]() Kepler first set up shop in 2009 and detected its first previously unknown exoplanet a year later. But not for the lack of trying-scientists floated around ideas for exoplanet hunters that were considered far too ambitious for their time. NASA via Wikimedia Commons The origins of LIFEīefore the 2000s, exoplanet discoveries were far and few in between, because humankind simply didn’t have the tools to seek them out. NASA’s concept for the Terrestrial Planet Finder in the early 2000s. LIFE could be the mission to pull off nulling interferometry’s redemption story. In the decades since, technology improvement has brought nulling interferometry closer to reality than ever before. LIFE’s concept is picking up steam, but it’s not the first time nulling interferometry in space has garnered interest-decades ago, the idea was foiled by technological and financial hurdles that made extraterrestrial nulling interferometry practically infeasible. (In contrast, the primary mirror of the world’s largest space observatory, JWST, is 21 feet wide.) Last year, the European Space Agency (ESA) selected exoplanet hunting as one of its three major mission themes in the coming decades, for which LIFE could be a major contender to carry it through. His team’s proposed infrared observatory involves five individual spacecraft flying in sync to achieve the resolution of a telescope with a 1,970-feet-wide primary mirror. ![]() The mission he champions makes no secret of its purpose: LIFE, which also stands for the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets, will scour the cosmos for Earth-like and potentially habitable exoplanets. While a space nulling interferometer isn’t going to be deployed in the next decades, one effort led by Sascha Quanz, an astrophysicist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, is pushing nulling interferometry from the drawing board to reality. ![]()
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