Terrestrial Planet Finder: the search for life elsewhere

The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission is a proposed interferometer instrument for direct detection of the light from planets around nearby stars. Targets will be Earth-like planets up to a million times fainter than their host stars, yet only 0.1 arcseconds away. Nulling interferometry (subtraction of the optical electric fields collected by several telescopes) suppresses the stellar glare to allow direct detection and coarse spectroscopic study of the thermal-IR light from a distant planet. We present an overview of studies led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), outlining the challenges and the potential payoffs of this mission.