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Issue 14 - October 2014
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Director's Update |
NASA Honor Award |
Program Update |
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Group Achievement Award |
Update from |
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The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) solicits applications for Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowships to begin in the fall of 2015. The deadline for applications and letters of reference and endorsement is Thursday, November 6, 2014 at 4 pm PST. The Sagan Fellowships support outstanding recent postdoctoral scientists to conduct independent research that is broadly related to the science goals of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration program.
In April NExScI announced the seven newest Sagan Fellows, read more about them here: http://nexsci.caltech.edu/sagan/2014postdocRecipients.shtml. See item 10 and item 11 for features on two of the current fellows: Jared Males and Rebecca Martin.
More information: http://nexsci.caltech.edu/sagan/fellowship.shtml
Questions: mailto:saganfellowship@ipac.caltech.edu
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In the previous edition of this newsletter we described how the evaluation of various coronagraph technologies for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey/Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets (WFIRST/AFTA) mission study resulted in the selection of the occulting mask coronagraph - an instrument that combines a Shaped Pupil Coronagraph (SPC) and a Hybrid Lyot Coronagraph (HLC). Since NASA's decision of the selection was announced in December of 2013, the technology development team at JPL and partner institutions has been rapidly maturing the coronagraph technology, and achieved a number of significant advances. Several highlights of this progress are described below.
For highlights of this progress read more here...
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The Kepler-K2 (K2) mission is an amazing story of perseverance and engineering ingenuity in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It is aptly named after the second highest mountain on Earth, which is generally considered harder to climb than Mount Everest.
Looking back, it is hard to believe that only a little more than a year has passed since we were faced with the fact that a second reaction wheel had stopped working on Kepler, no longer allowing us to control the fine attitude of the spacecraft. The data collection for the hugely successful Kepler mission had come to a sudden end. Today the K2 mission has completed its first science campaign, not only continuing the search for exoplanets, but contributing to a large variety of astrophysics topics.
Read more here....
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NASA's two Science and Technology Definition Teams (STDTs) are nearing completion of their respective "probe-scale" mission concepts. In May 2013, NASA selected the two STDTs to develop space mission concepts capable of directly imaging planets orbiting nearby stars at a cost below $1B - "probe-class." One team is studying a concept using a telescope and coronagraph and is being led by Karl Stapelfeldt of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The other team is exploring a concept based on a spacecraft carrying a telescope and imager and flying in formation with a second spacecraft carrying an occulting starshade. That team is being led by Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Read more here...
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Before we do science, we plan for doing science, and that is what I'd like to talk about for this newsletter. In particular, there has been a flurry of planning activity for exoplanet science with the WFIRST/AFTA mission. The Science Definition Team (SDT) for WFIRST/AFTA issued its interim report in May, available at http://wfirst.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/sdt_public/WFIRST-AFTA_SDT_Interim_Report_April_2014.pdf, and is now working on its final report, due in January 2015.
As part of planning for the coronagraph instrument (CGI) on board, relevant members of the SDT have been looking closely at the expected science results from the CGI, including modeling the expected detections and spectra of planets and disks. They have also held three face-to-face meetings with the engineers who are designing the instrument in an iterative process to ensure that all the science that we want to accomplish can be carried out by the mission, and that the instrument to do this can be built and tested on schedule and within budget. In the language of mathematical physics, we are solving a boundary value problem in four dimensions.
Precision Radial Velocity (PRV) has been a key technique for detection of exoplanets for the past two decades, and the databases built up over that time are a valuable resource for the WFIRST/AFTA coronagraph (and also for the two Probe-scale mission concept studies). Many of the likely candidate target stars have already been observed with PRV. So an important question to pose is: what range of planet sizes and orbit radii of interest to WFIRST/AFTA could have been detected by current PRV (or a continuation of those programs)? To this end, ExEP initiated a contract with Andrew Howard, University of Hawaii (representing the California Planet Search Team), to investigate the detectability of planets in this search space. The results will be made available to the three study teams.
Leslie Sage edited a five-article review of exoplanet science in the 18 September issue of Nature, well worth reading: http://www.nature.com/nature/supplements/insights/exoplanets/index.html
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Before NASA decides to embark on an exciting space mission one of the questions it asks is "How certain is success?" Often that question is dependent on the maturity of the key technologies specific to that mission. In some cases, the technologies required have not yet even been invented! To help develop the exoplanet technologies NASA needs when they need them is a program called TDEM - Technology Development for Exoplanet Missions. This program identifies what NASA believes to be the areas of technology needing development and opens to the entire science community the opportunity to propose good ideas. These proposals are evaluated by an independent team of reviewers who rank the submissions in order of benefit to the exoplanet goals and feasibility. Depending on available funding, some number of the top proposals is selected.
A good example of how this process works is from NASA's quest to find life in the Universe. One of the key technologies is suppressing the bright light from a star so that we can see the reflected light from an orbiting nearby planet that is at least a billion times fainter! Back in 2009, NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program made its first call for TDEM proposals and selected several to advance coronagraph and starshade technologies. Since that time selected proposals have focused on designing, fabricating, and demonstrating coronagraph masks and deformable mirrors. Others have developed starshade petals and deployment experiments. Thanks to that early foresight of its needs, these lab demonstrations are allowing exoplanet instruments to be ready for launch in the next decade.
For more information on past and current TDEM awardees and their reports please go to: http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/technology/
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August 2014 brought the unveiling of the Starshade Deployment Testbed (SDT) at JPL. This testbed is meant to enable scientists and engineers to meet the challenging petal stowing and deployment requirements for a possible future Starshade mission. See a mission animation here...
The first sub-assembly test was the deployment of a 10m diameter expanding ring truss, to which the Starshade petals attach. Led by three early-career JPL engineers, the truss concept design began in February 2014 and involved a team of six interns and four student workers. By August, the truss concept with 4 of the design's 28 petals was ready for a functional deployment. The designing and building of this prototype provided the opportunity for these university students to be critical members in the flight path development of an exciting potential NASA mission.
This testbed, open to investigators from all institutions, will be a platform for advancing the technology readiness level of the many Starshade subsystems. These include the optical shield, petal stowing and unfurling system, and the many critical interfaces to the spacecraft.
This current development is already attracting attention, with the first powered deployment of the ring truss being filmed for an episode of the Science Channel program, "Strip the Cosmos," to air in November. Stay tuned.
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At the end of July, NExScI hosted the 2014 Sagan Summer Workshop "Imaging Planets and Disks" on the Caltech campus. There were 150 participants in attendance from 13 different countries for this 15th, and second largest, of the Sagan/Michelson Summer Workshops. Workshop interactive features included attendee posters and oral pop presentations. In addition there were several hands-on sessions such as a competition to design your own mission, learning about multiple ways to reduce your imaging data to identify and characterize planets and disks, and a session to build your own coronagraph. All hands-on sessions made use of Amazon Web Cloud Computing Services. This is the second Sagan Workshop for which the Amazon Cloud has been used in this capacity. All presentations and electronic posters are available from the workshop website: http://nexsci.caltech.edu/workshop/2014.
You can also watch your favorite exoplanet YouTubers as they present the latest in exoplanet research! Videos of all of the science presentations from the 2014 Sagan Summer Workshop, "Imaging Planets and Disks," are now available on YouTube at the Sagan Exoplanet Summer Workshop channel. See http://goo.gl/AWNmw8.
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At the June 2014 Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, ExEP hosted a series of four science sessions motivated by this question: What kind of exoplanets lie at orbit radii of 1-2 AU - beyond the reach of Kepler? The session title derives from the famous quote from Isaac Newton in 1676: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," though the phrase has been in use since the 12th century. In the current era, the Kepler mission has greatly advanced our understanding of exoplanets and allowed us to 'see further.' But because of its limited lifetime, Kepler's sampling of the planet population beyond about 1 AU is very incomplete.
Several techniques have been exploring this long-period orbit regime in the last two decades: we have a catalog of RV-detected planets, distant planets detected with microlensing, and several hot young planets at large radii from direct imaging, and imaging of the debris disks that provide clues to formation and evolution of exoplanets.
The sessions at the AAS Meeting covered these four topics:
The collection of 24 talks on these topics cover a broad sweep of current exoplanet research, presented by invited experts in the field. You can view PDFs of these presentations on the ExEP Presentations page.
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Direct imaging is a key technology being developed to characterize habitable extrasolar planets. While taking a picture of an exo-Earth is out of reach with today's instruments, the latest adaptive optics (AO) systems are delivering performance good enough that we can begin looking for larger planets in the habitable zone (HZ). The goal of my research as a Sagan Fellow is to image Jupiter and Saturn sized planets in the HZs of nearby bright stars. The instrument I helped develop and am now using to search these nearby HZs is the Magellan AO system, or MagAO. MagAO has been used to image the exoplanet beta Pictoris b in the optical, discovered the planet HD 106906 b, and achieves 19 milli-arcsecond resolution at the wavelength of H-alpha.
You can find out more about MagAO and its infrared and visible-light imaging capabilities at http://visao.as.arizona.edu.
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Planets are thought to form within a protoplanetary disc around young stars. Moons can form within a circumplanetary disc around giant planets. Thus, understanding angular momentum transport in these accretion discs is fundamental to explaining the formation of planetary and satellite systems and their survival after the disc has dispersed.
Most stars are found in binaries and thus it is important to understand the evolution of these systems. Recently, we found that if a disc is highly misaligned to the binary orbit, the disc may be unstable to large eccentricity and inclination oscillations (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014arXiv1409.1226M). This is known as the Kozai-Lidov effect. We are now working to understand how this process affects the planetary systems that can form in binary star systems.
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A new exhibit steeped in the cinematic world of "The Avengers" provides a super-powered dose of science and technology from NASA's Exoplanet Program. The unique, interactive educational display premiered at Discovery Times Square in New York City on May 30, 2014, for a six-month engagement.
NASA's Eyes on Exoplanets interactive is featured prominently in the Marvel Avengers S.T.A.T.I.O.N. - an acronym for Scientific Training and Tactical Intelligence Operative Network -- helping to place otherworldly content related to The Avengers' Thor into the context of real exoplanets.
While movie magic is the exhibit's main attraction, its developers approached JPL's visualization team to provide content that would enhance the authenticity of the experience and pique visitors' interest in real-world science and technology.
"Eyes" is powered by NASA's Exoplanet Archive and is available at http://eyes.jpl.nasa.gov/exoplanets/index.html. "Eyes on Exoplanets" was developed by the Visualization Technology Applications and Development group at JPL under sponsorship of the Exoplanet Exploration Program. More information about the exhibit is available at: http://stationexhibit.com.
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