NASA's Next Telescope Will Hunt for Alien Life

NASA is designing a telescope with one staggering goal: to look at other Earth-like planets and find out if anything is alive on them.

It is called the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Its job is to study at least 25 planets the size of Earth, orbiting other stars, in the zones where liquid water could exist.

The challenge is brutal. An Earth-like planet is a faint speck lost in the glare of its star, like spotting a firefly beside a searchlight from miles away. The telescope will use a special shield to block the starlight and reveal the tiny planet beside it. Then it will read that planet's air, hunting for gases like oxygen and methane, the same chemicals produced in abundance by life on Earth.

If it finds those gases in the right mix on a distant world, it would be the strongest hint yet that we are not alone. This is a telescope being built to answer whether life exists beyond Earth.

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