2017-04-13

crazy space hardware

I spent today at JPL, where Leonidas Moustakas (JPL) set up for me a great schdule with various of the astronomers. I met the famous John Trauger (JPL), who was the PI on WFPC2 and deserves some share of the credit for repairing the Hubble Space Telescope. I discussed coronography with Trauger and various others. I learned about the need for coronographs to have two (not just one) deformable mirror to be properly adaptive. With Dimitri Mawet (Caltech) I discussed what kind of data set we would like to have in order to learn in a data-driven way to predictively adapt the deformable mirrors in a coronograph that is currently taking data.

With Eric Huff (JPL) I discussed the possibility of doing weak lensing without ever explicitly measuring any galaxies—that is, measuring shear in the pixels of the images of the field directly. I also discussed with him the (apparently insane but maybe not) idea of using the Sun itself as a gravitational lens, capable of imaging continents on a distant, rocky exoplanet. This requires getting a spacecraft out to some 550 AU, and then positioning it to km accuracy! Oh and then blocking out the light from the Sun.

Martin Elvis (CfA) gave a provocative talk today, about the future of NASA astrophysics in the context of commercial space, which might drive down prices on launch vehicles, and drive up the availability of heavy lift. A theme of his talk, and a theme of many of my conversations during the day, was just how long the time-scales are on NASA astrophysics missions, from proposal to launch. At some point missions might start to take longer than a career; that could be very bad (or at least very disruptive) for the field.

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