Durham University designing digital camera to seek for alien life

Scientists at Durham University are serving to to develop a brand new sort of digital camera supposed to assist seek for life on distant planets.

Researchers there are a part of a UK crew designing a high-resolution imaging digital camera for use on Nasa’s Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) mission.

HWO would be the first telescope particularly designed to seek out Earth-like planets and study them for indicators of life.

Prof Richard Massey of Durham University stated the brand new expertise could be the “21st Century’s Hubble Space Telescope” and will assist make quite a lot of main discoveries.

“As well as looking for life, a telescope that amazing will watch collisions of asteroids in our solar system, stare into black holes, and solve the mystery of dark matter,” he stated.

Nasa’s HWO mission is predicted to launch within the early 2040s.

Rocky planets like Earth are tough to check as they’re positioned near stars and can’t be seen on account of their brightness.

The telescope will use an instrument referred to as a coronagraph to dam out the brilliant glare and permit rocky planets to be seen for the primary time.

It is hoped the digital camera will be capable to measure a planet’s mass and examine its ambiance for chemical indicators of life.

The UK {hardware} crew is led by University College London and consists of scientists and engineers from the University of Portsmouth, RAL Space, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre and Durham University.

It is one in all two teams funded by the UK Space Agency to research the feasibility of a UK-led high-resolution imager.

The different group is led by the University of Leicester.