The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is a planned NASA flagship space telescope whose core science goal is to directly image and spectrally characterize Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars. It is the successor concept to the 2020 Astrophysics Decadal Survey’s “IROUV” recommendation, combining elements of prior LUVOIR and HabEx studies.
HWO will advance direct-imaging techniques developed by jwst and the nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope coronagraph. sara-seager et al. (2025) argue HWO-class next-gen observatories are needed to move beyond jwst’s “parallel interpretations” limit on biosignature retrieval (src-jwst-biosignature-prospects-2025). Mid-IR complement: LIFE.
Priority Near-Term Targets
- alpha-centauri-a — candidate gas giant in habitable zone (2026)
- gj-887-d — super-Earth in habitable zone of nearby M dwarf (2026)
- Proxima Centauri b