Known as the High Definition Space Telescope, or HDST, it would sit a million miles from Earth, its 54 individual mirrors combining to form a surface with 25 times that of Hubble—enough muscle to search scores of Earthlike exoplanets for signs of life, lay bare secrets of the birth of galaxies like the Milky Way, and study our own solar system in astonishing detail. It would also make images so stunningly sharp they’d far outshine Hubble’s own eye-popping photographs.
