Habitable Worlds Observatory
NASA’s next flagship space telescope will directly image Earth-like planets around nearby stars and search their atmospheres for signs of life — demanding picometer-level optical stability.
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is NASA’s next flagship astrophysics mission, recommended by the Astro2020 decadal survey and planned for the 2040s. This large space telescope will directly image roughly two dozen Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars and analyze their atmospheres for the chemical signatures of life — the first observatory designed specifically to answer whether we are alone.
Why extreme stability matters
Seeing an Earth twin next to a star ten billion times brighter requires the telescope’s optics to hold their shape to the picometer level — a thousandth of the diameter of an atom — for hours at a time. Achieving and verifying stability at that scale is a precision-measurement challenge of the kind PSSL specializes in, from LISA’s interferometry to drag-free flight technology.
UF Contribution
PSSL contributes its precision measurement expertise to HWO technology development through work on the Tracking Frequency Gauge (TFG), a laser metrology system for sensing and stabilizing the relative positions of the telescope's primary mirror segments. The group is currently building a time-domain simulation of the TFG to model its dynamic behavior under realistic disturbances, and is using that model to guide the selection of baseline components for the instrument. This effort is carried out jointly with the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, under Lockheed Martin, which supports L3Harris in NASA's HWO technology maturation program.
