**A team of NASA researchers is developing new types of optical masks that could help enable the many orders of magnitude of starlight suppression needed for future space observatories to pick out very faint habitable exoplanets from the far brighter glare of their stellar hosts.** Artist’s conception of an exoplanet reflecting the light from its nearby star. NASA One of the goals of NASA’s Astrophysics Division is to carry out a census of nearby solar systems to search for habitable worlds around nearby stars, and ultimately, to determine whether life might be present outside our own solar system. Because other stars are so far away, we must rely on remote observations of these systems, and in particular, on the spectroscopy of any planets present (i.e., on the examination of their color characteristics to determine their atmospheric characteristics).…