A new federally commissioned report recommends the construction of a new type of space telescope to help find life on other planets or discover other solar systems like ours.

Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist at Stanford University who was a member of the report committee, says the proposed telescope would directly image Earth-like exoplanets orbiting stars similar to our sun, and could work in conjunction with ground-based observatories to gather chemical data about exoplanet atmospheres.

Here, Macintosh talks about how the proposed telescope would work, where it’s likely to find distant solar systems, and what we can learn by looking for habitable planets.

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