The next great space telescope

The creators of the James Webb propose the creation of a large telescope in their proposal plan for the decennial survey of astronomy and astrophysics; It is an event that takes place every 10 years, astronomers, cosmologists and astrophysicists from all over the world are asked to submit proposals for the projects that they believe have the greatest importance in the field to be carried out during the following decade.

Hubble was proposed this way in 1982, James Webb in 1991, as well as other major ground-orbiting astronomical projects such as the Spitzer X-ray Observatory, Chandra, and ongoing projects such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled for to be launched in 2027 and on land at the Vera C. Rubin observatory, which is expected to see its first light in 2023 in Coquimbo Chile.

In each astronomy and astrophysics signal survey a panel of experts votes for the most important projects from among the hundreds that send scientists from all over the world to select which ones should be given the highest priority, and therefore funding. , sometimes it happens that there are two very important proposals but that their capacities are transferred and they end up being combined in a single project, as is the case of the successor to Hubble, the Carl Sagan observatory.

It is a space telescope with the capabilities of Hubble, that is, visible light with a little bit of infrared and a little bit of ultraviolet, and also the ability to analyze exoplanets, but bigger than Hubble and even James Webb.

The project is the combination of two previous proposals, the large optical ultraviolet and infrared observatory LUVOIR for its acronym in English and the habitable exoplanet observatory or HabEx for short, one focused mainly on being the successor to Hubble and the other on the analysis of the composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets.

Those projects were very ambitious, the LUVOIR telescope was huge, it had a mirror of 15 meters in diameter and the HabEx was 4 meters in diameter, but the suggestions that scientists send for the survey usually go beyond the capabilities they will have because they know that To be chosen, there will be a negotiation process where some concessions will have to be made to make the project cheaper and more viable, therefore, these two large projects were taken to turn them into one and thus be cheaper.

Being the flagship project, the most important, the most ambitious and of course the most expensive of this survey of astronomy and astrophysics, the Carl Sagan observatory, it is a concept in process and the proposal that is already recommended to NASA as a priority to be developed and built over the next decade and its name well deserved by Carl Sagan for being one of the greatest science communicators on the planet.

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