In Brief:

March 23, 2000
Web posted at: 9:53 a.m. EST (1453 GMT)

PASADENA, California -- Scientists have started design work on an ambitious mission to seek life-supporting planets outside the solar system, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Wednesday.

JPL selected four teams of mostly academic and industrial researchers to develop concepts for the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission, which will study 250 star system to search for signs of life-sustaining planets.

"We will be looking for warm, water-bearing planets like Earth, and even for signs of primitive life," JPL project scientist Charles Beichman said in a statement.

Success will require new instruments so sensitive that they can identify life-sustaining chemicals on a planet up to 50 light years from Earth. It will also depend on the ability to cancel out a star's glare so that a planet 1 million times fainter can be seen.

"The challenge is like trying to locate a firefly next to the beam of a brilliant searchlight," Beichman said.

The Terrestrial Planet Finder, slated to launch in 2012, will consist of several telescope orbiters flying in a precise formation over a span of several hundred yards (meters).

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Terrestrial Planet Finder
NASA's Origins Program

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