What is the New Worlds Imager?
The New Worlds Imager is the proposed final stage of New Worlds Mission, a proposal to put up a network of huge large starshades and accompanying telescopes. By using precisely design occulters (starshades), space telescopes could better image planets in other solar systems, many of which are more than a billion times more faint than the stars they orbit. The first starshade could be deployed in front of an already-existing telescope, such as James Webb Space Telescope. Headed by Dr. Webster Cash of the University of Colorado at Boulder, the New Worlds Imager was funded by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts until it was dissolved in 2007. Exoplanets are so distant and faint that a starshade is practically necessary to image them at all. Another plausible technique is interferometry, which means the collation of data between different telescopes. One of the possibilities of the New Worlds Mission, the New Worlds Imager, would combine together multiple telescopes (interferometry) w
