Darwin (spacecraft)

Darwin was a suggested ESA Cornerstone mission which would have involved a constellation of four to nine^[2] spacecraft designed to directly detect Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars and search for evidence of life on these planets. The most recent design envisaged three free-flying space telescopes, each three to four metres in diameter, flying in formation as an astronomical interferometer. These telescopes were to redirect light from distant stars and planets to a fourth spacecraft, which would have contained the beam combiner, spectrometers, and cameras for the interferometer array, and which would have also acted as a communications hub. There was also an earlier design, called the "Robin Laurance configuration," which included six 1.5 metre telescopes, a beam combiner spacecraft, and a separate power and communications spacecraft.^[3]

The study of this proposed mission ended in 2007 with no further activities planned.^[1] To produce an image, the telescopes would have had to operate in formation with distances between the telescopes controlled to within a few micrometres, and the distance between the telescopes and receiver controlled to within about one nanometre.^[4] Several more detailed studies would have been needed to determine whether technology capable of such precision is actually feasible.^[2]