The State - News from Jan. 9, 1985

NASA and the University of Arizona signed an agreement for a joint project to mount a $100-million telescope atop a space station to search for planets outside the solar system. The memorandum of understanding was signed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View. The project’s principal scientists are David C. Black of Ames and Eugene H. Levy, director of the university’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Black said the telescope, expected to be placed on the planned space station by the mid-1990s, would help determine whether other planetary systems exist. Congress has yet to approve and fund the project, but Levy said initial work on it should begin soon.