These telescopes were to redirect light from distant stars and planets to a fourth spacecraft, which would have contained the beam combiner, spectrometers, and cameras for the interferometer array, and which would have also acted as a communications hub.
According to a 2000 ESA bulletin, all spacecraft components in the optical path would have to be passively cooled to 40 kelvins to allow infrared observations to take place.
In this system, phase shifts would be introduced into the three beams, so that light from the central star would suffer destructive interference and cancel itself out.
[citation needed] A 2002 design which would have used 1.5 metre mirrors was expected to take about 100 hours to get a spectrum of a possibly Earth-like planet.
Numerical simulations[citation needed] have shown that under proper conditions it is possible to build up an oxygen atmosphere via photolysis of carbon dioxide.
[6] It orbits within the theoretical habitable zone of its star,[7] and scientists surmise that conditions on the planet might be conducive to supporting life.
Antoine Labeyrie has proposed a much larger space-based astronomical interferometer similar to Darwin, but with the individual telescopes positioned in a spherical arrangement and with an emphasis on interferometric imaging.