Looking for another blue dot: scientists are building a telescope to seek second Earth, with crowdfunding

On Valentine’s Day 1990, from a dark and frozen spot on the outer edges of our solar system, the spacecraft Voyager 1 turned around to take one last photo of the world it left behind.

Viewed from a distance of 6 billion kilometres, Earth was little more than a bluish pixel, a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” in the words of Carl Sagan. Although the space programme has produced countless gorgeous photographs of our planet - exquisite images of deep blue oceans and swirling clouds, of the incandescent spider web that is human civilisation at night - nothing else has captured so starkly the profound loneliness of this precious, pale blue dot we call home.

Now scientists want to find a companion for that dot.

On Tuesday, a consortium of private research institutions launched a crowdfunding campaign to help build a new space telescope capable of searching for and photographing planets in the star system Alpha Centauri - which holds the closest stars to our sun. They call the mission “Project Blue.”

“We are seeking to take another pale blue-dot image,” said Jon Morse, former director of NASA’s astrophysics division and current chief executive of the BoldlyGo Institute, a research organization that is co-leading Project Blue. “This is the holy grail of exoplanet research.”

Before December 20, Morse and his partner Brett Marty, executive director of the nonprofit Mission Centaur, aim to raise US$1 million via Kickstarter - enough seed funding to get their project going. The rest of their budget will likely come from foundations and wealthy donors. The telescope, which they hope to launch into low Earth orbit in 2019, would only be about the size of a dishwasher; its half-metre main mirror could fit on a coffee table.