High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The New Worlds Mission was a project funded by NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) (defunct as of 2007), and headed by Dr. Webster Cash of the University of Colorado at Boulder in conjunction with Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Northrop Grumman, Southwest Research Institute and others. The project plans to build a large occulter in space designed to block the light of nearby stars in order to observe their orbiting planets. The observations could be taken with an existing space telescope, possibly the James Webb Space Telescope when it launches, or a dedicated visible light telescope optimally designed for the task of finding exoplanets.