Technical Hurdles Overcome for New Space Telescopes

via ScienceDaily. Big day for astronomy posts I guess.

With a relatively simply method, two researchers have overcome the technical hurdles necessary to directly image exoplanets with the soon to launch Terrestrial Planet Finder mission next year.

"two researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have shown that a fairly simple coronagraph - an instrument used to "mask" a star's glare - paired with an adjustable mirror, could enable a space telescope to image a distant planet 10 billion times fainter than its central star."

These two items, with the aid of computer processing, overcome the twin difficulties of light diffraction and scattering that hinders a telescope pointed at a neighboring star from seeing anything in orbit around it. So far, no one has discovered a star whose planetary organization is like that of our own system, but the application of this technique with the new generation of space imaging satellites planned might allow us to look more closely at neighboring stars and perhaps find just such a system.