NASA systems engineering team details Habitable Worlds Observatory mission architecture

Finding an Earth-like world beyond the solar system is the holy grail of exoplanet research, and the field has seen remarkable technological advances in detecting and studying exoplanets since the first confirmed exoplanet around a sun-like star was discovered in 1995. These advances include ground- and space-based telescopes, notably the James Webb Space Telescope. Although astronomers have already directly imaged some exoplanets, directly imaging Earth-like planets around sun-like stars remains a major technological challenge, primarily because these planets are extremely faint compared with their host stars and appear very close to them in the sky.