CICC 2000 Events: Luncheon Speaker

You can view the slides from this talk in Portable Document Format (pdf, 3.6MB).

Of Hummingbirds and Undiscovered Worlds: Optical Interferometry and NASA's Quest for Habitable Planets

Dr. Rudolf Danner, Space Interferometry Mission

Tuesday, May 23
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Have you ever looked up at a clear night sky, amazed by the sheer countless number of stars and asked yourself: Are we alone? Or are there other planets like Earth out there, orbiting some distant stars where other sentient beings might ponder the sky? Will we ever know?

NASA's Origins program has set out to use optical interferometry, a technique pioneered one hundred years ago by Albert Michelson, to find and characterize Earth size planets around other stars than our own Sun. Today NASA plans to exploit interference of optical light, the effect that gives us the brilliant colors of the hummingbird, to create powerful arrays of telescopes in space. Some of them forming virtual telescopes the size of Texas.

The technological challenges are formidable, including measuring the positions of mirrors over tens of meters to a fraction of the diameter of a hydrogen atom. The scientific payoff however, is no less rewarding. At the beginning of the next decade we might be able to decide whether a extrasolar planet is surrounded by an atmosphere at room temperature. We will learn whether the planet contains liquid water, Ozone and Nitrogen, the basic ingredients that we believe to be essential to support life. We may even be able to deduce signs of biological activity on the surface of such a planet.

This talk will introduce you to what we hope to find out, where we are in this challenge, and why we think that we are facing a decade of tremendous discoveries.