In the nearly 25 years since the launch of the Hubble Space
Telescope (HST), astronomers and the public alike have enjoyed ground-breaking
views of the cosmos and the suite of scientific discoveries that followed. The
successor to HST, the James Webb Space Telescope should launch in 2018 but will
have a comparatively short lifetime.
Now Prof Martin Barstow of the University of Leicester is
looking to the future. In his talk at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2014)
in Portsmouth on Tuesday 24 June, he calls for governments and space agencies
around the world to back the Advanced Technologies Large Aperture Space
Telescope (ATLAST), an instrument that would give scientists a good chance of
detecting hints of life on planets around other stars.