Looking for a Mirror, NY Times
“The challenges to photographing a mirror Earth are daunting, but not insurmountable. A small rocky planet is a dim mote of dust lost in the glare from a thermonuclear fireball we call a star. For every photon of planetary light that goes into making a picture, 10 billion stellar photons must first be filtered out; remarkably, researchers have already devised several ways to do this. All that the planet-hunters really need to find the mirror Earths is a big mirror, high above the Earth’s blurring atmosphere — a space telescope large enough to gather the faint light of Goldilocks worlds around a sizable sample of stars.”

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4 replies on “Looking For Other Earths”

  2. I’ll second Andrew’s question. How big of a telescope are we talking about? And I thought JWST would be able to spot planets in infrared, at least if they’re within 20-30 light-years of Earth.

  3. Bit of a non-article really. Just vaguely criticising the (unnammed and unquoted) critics of the perceived fixation on “goldilocks” exoplanets.

  4. They are called Terrestrial Planet Finders telescopes. http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/TP…
    Multiple small telescopes on a fixed structure or on separated spacecraft floating in precision formation would simulate a much larger, very powerful telescope

    http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/TP…
    A large optical telescope, with a mirror three to four times bigger and at least 100 times more precise than the Hubble Space Telescope, would collect starlight and the very dim reflected light from the planets. The telescope would have special optics to reduce the starlight by a factor of one billion, thus enabling astronomers to detect faint planets.

    Both were cancelled in 2011 due to lack of funding.

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