Wednesday, April 11, 2007, 11:00 pm, Pratt Conference Room
>>> Note special day and time <<<
Exoplanets with Large and Small Projects
Dr. Michael Shao (JPL)
| The talk will cover two related but separate topics. SIM Planet Quest is a space astrometric interferometer that can make very precise relative position measurements ~1 uas in ~ 1000sec. In order to detect planets with a 1uas astrometric signature, multiple 1uas measurements must be made and those errors should average down as roughly sqrt(N). We've now tested in the lab the long term stability of the SIM design and demonstrated a systematic noise floow below 0.1uas. With this in mind it's possible to redesign the terrestrial planet observing program so that an Earth Clone (1 Earth mass, 1AU scaled to stellar luminosity) could be found around the nearest ~64 stars. The 2nd topic is a small project, a collaboration of BU, MIT, GSFC and JPL to launch a high contrast coronagraph on a sounding rocket hopefully in July/August 2007. The goal is to detect the light from the Jovian companion to E Eri. The instrument is a 50cm telescope with a nulling interferometer/coronagraph and post coronagraph wavefront sensor driving a 32*32 deformable mirror. A brief overview of the project will be presented concentrating on the status of the nulling coronagraph being built at JPL. |
