

Exoplanets in Pictures - rvkennedy
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/bad_astronomy/2012/11/exoplanet_pictures_astronomers_have_photos_of_alien_planets.html

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rvkennedy
This is about a month old, and completely passed me by, though the oldest
image is actually from 2004. Growing up, this is something I was told we would
never, never see - planets are simply too small, too dim, and too far away. We
were told we'll never really know if they're even there.

So now we have pictures. Perhaps some day, if telescopes can be positioned
sufficiently far apart in the Solar System, we can build an array that could
image nearby exoplanets in fine detail. As for signs of life - that may be
more tricky than a visual inspection - unless we see the glow of cities...

~~~
mturmon
Space missions to detect Earth-sized planets had been planned for the middle
of this decade:

<http://sim.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm>

And higher-resolution interferometers to take images of such planets for later
in the decade:

<http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF-I/tpf-I_index.cfm>

Both missions were cancelled a couple of years ago. It's a budget problem, not
a fundamental technology problem.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It's both. Both SIM and especially TPF kept slipping farther behind schedule,
more over budget, and with increasingly questionable capabilities. The
fundamental problem is that NASA is averse to iterative and competitive
development styles, which is absolutely necessary in this case.

As a case in point, look at the JWST, which will end up costing around $10
billion (more than 1,000% over budget) and over a decade behind schedule. The
TPF is easily an order of magnitude more technologically challenging than JWST
and would require putting 4x as much hardware into space. If it were managed
the same way as JWST it would end up costing perhaps $100 billion and not
launching until 2030 or later.

~~~
mturmon
You have a point. I think SIM didn't have significant tech problems, but too
much of its work became do-able from the ground during the interval when its
problems were being solved. That's the reason it got a lower priority in the
National Academy report that determines astrophysics mission priorities. And
since SIM was a pathfinder for TPF...

~~~
InclinedPlane
A lot of it comes down to the way NASA is organized. Generally it's big budget
missions with a single spacecraft as the culmination of the mission. Rather
than ongoing development programs. Also, NASA has this tendency to want to
skip technology generations even though the end result tends to take longer to
deliver and cost more than it would have if they would have just explored the
intermediate technology space to start with (see: JWST and VentureStar). While
we're talking about JWST, that's another big part of the way things are at
NASA these days, that program has eaten most of the unmanned NASA budget and
put a significant crimp on space science missions. It'll probably be worth it,
but the cost is pretty extreme at this point. Also on the topic of JWST, I
remember back when they were planning to have a flight demonstrator (Nexus) in
the form of a Hubble class Earth-orbiting telescope using some of the
NGST/JWST technology. Such a mission probably would have brought the risk of
the JWST program more under control but for whatever reason they ended up
cancelling it.

TPF is another example of planning farther ahead than is fully justified. As
the program advanced the design became less and less fixed rather than more
and more refined. This is an indication that they were designing something
that was beyond their expertise and needed more intermediate research to
figure out, but with the budget crunch and the lack of vision nobody could
come up with good enough ideas to do so. NASA set their sights on deep nulling
interferometry and it sounded like a really cool technology that might be
capable of doing what they needed, but more and more it seems like that may
not have been the best technology choice, and it led to a far too expensive
system to fund.

If instead of JWST and SIM and TPF NASA had instead hitched it's wagon to a
more incremental development approach, of launching Hubble or Kepler class
telescopes in the $1 billion budget range every 2 or 3 years or so and using
that program as a test bed for new technologies and new scientific
investigations I think we'd be in a much better state right now and probably a
lot closer toward having the capability to directly image exoplanets
routinely. But who knows if that would have been the case.

On the plus side, the impending drop in the costs of orbital launch due to
SpaceX et al will probably force NASA into a model such as that, so maybe
we'll see if it generates better results.

