NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory is the agency's next flagship space telescope, designed to do something no previous instrument has managed: directly image Earth-like planets around nearby stars and analyze the light reflecting off their atmospheres for signs of life.
The mission is still years from launch. But the design choices being made right now will determine what it can actually detect. A new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server tackles one of the most consequential of those choices: spectral resolution.
