This thing was pitched as a hubble replacement by Aviation Week & Space Technology last summer, but the CNN article seems to imply they've changed the focus. Or the people that wrote this press release were different from the ones that are actually working on the project (AW&ST tends not to report as much from raw press releases as the "mainline" news orgs).

Regardless, it's tres cool. Although, to (sort of) quote Calvin:

"Sometimes I think the surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is the fact that we can't find it"