The telescope has a celebrated history and may enjoy an even more illustrious future should it play a part in detecting alien life on extrasolar planets.
The biggest of all prizes for the next generation of telescopes – ones with names such as Darwin and James Webb – will be to discover the first truly Earth-like planet orbiting a distant star. By monitoring the spectrographic signature in the atmosphere of such an “extrasolar” planet it may even be possible to determine whether it harbours life. If so, it could be a telescope that answers one of the deepest questions of all: are we alone?
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