The Habitable Worlds Observatory In Historical Context

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is humanity’s most ambitious scientific endeavor to explore nearby sun-like stars for the presence of habitable rocky exoplanets and the possible presence of life.

In designing HWO to address this age-old question, we will also be creating a space telescope that will revolutionize our understanding of a broad range of astrophysics. The science cases and technical discussions in these proceedings document some of the key driving ideas that will inform the design and performance of HWO.

Equally important, these articles represent input from a very wide range of astrophysics and planetary science researchers, aerospace engineers, optical systems designers, and space agency representatives.

As with previous successful great observatories, the HWO architecture and its strong and growing support by the astronomical community, the public, industry, and partner space agencies are built upon decades of effort by hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

In this foreword, we summarize the key scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs, and insightful programmatic developments from the 1980s to the present that have brought us to this remarkable point in time.

Marc Postman, Karl Stapelfeldt

Comments: 10 pages. To be published in the proceedings “Towards the Habitable Worlds Observatory: Visionary Science and Transformational Technology”
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2602.14823 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2602.14823v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.14823
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Submission history
From: Marc Postman
[v1] Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:14:58 UTC (1,650 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14823

Astrobiology, Astronomy, exoplanet,