Next-Generation NASA Space Telescopes

[Music] you know I think we all know how impactful space telescopes have been in the incredible science and understanding they've enabled as a result of putting eyes someplace other than on earth so the Hubble Space Telescope was a complete game-changer and transformative in what it has taught us about the cosmos interesting as well and and fascinating for what it has revealed in my opinion one of the most impactful and profound programs in NASA's history is the Kepler space telescope which taught us that planets are everywhere well tonight we're going to be talking about the next generation of space telescopes that are in the planning phases right now there's a whole program of mission concepts that NASA goes through where they look ahead to the next decade and they put together teams to propose and conceive and then propose ideas for new space telescopes new research platforms but tonight of course it's telescopes so we're gonna hear from three individuals this evening who are part of the so-called Science and Technology Definition teams or stdt for three different missions we're going to talk about the habitable exoplanet Observatory or hab X will be speaking about the large UV optical infrared surveyor mission concept called leVoir and we're going to be also hearing about a space telescope concept mission called origins and tonight we have three very esteemed guests to talk to us about these telescopes and we're going to have a little fun it isn't really a competition again these are our scientists trying to make a case for for the various kinds of missions that are supported and suggested by these telescopes but tonight we're going to ask you at the end to vote on which one you like the best so you're gonna get to play you know NASA Administrator or you know vice president of taxpayer funding yeah you it's gonna be like yeah like so and so we'll give you the opportunity to see who has had the most compelling mission put forward this evening we'll also give you a question - an opportunity to have some questions at the end so we'll get to that as well we are live streaming tonight as I mentioned on our Facebook channel and if those of you out there and Facebook land are so inclined we will also be taking some questions from our virtual audience we would ask you to send those questions as tweets however not not through the Facebook channel we have Rebecca here watching our Twitter page which is hashtag SETI talks so if you have a question that you'd like to ask one of our speakers go to hashtag city talks ask your question and we'll try to get it in and and and address it this evening so without further ado I'd like to ask our speakers to come forward I'll introduce them one at a time and give you a little background on each one and starting with dr. Kimberly anikó Smith so Kimberly if you would come on up and I'll introduce you so dr. Smith is a NASA research astrophysicist at the NASA Ames Research Center right here in Silicon Valley in Mountain View about five minutes from our office she's a multi she's multidisciplinary in her approach to space instruments telescopes and mission concepts she's designed and built infrared airborne and Space Telescope cameras and spectrometers tested detectors and laboratories and particle accelerators designed low-cost supportable orbital instruments built lunar payloads and most recently served as deputy project scientist leading the calibration for the new horizons Pluto flyby mission which Frank just talked about and project scientists for the flying infrared Observatory Sofia which is another program that the Institute is intimately involved with so Kimberly welcome next up professor Scott Gowdy so Scott come on up Scott as a leader in the discovery and statistical characterization of extrasolar planets using a variety of methods including transits and gravitational microlensing in 2008 he and his collaborators announced the discovery of the first Jupiter Saturn analog professor Gaudi is deeply immersed in analytical and numerical techniques for assessing the yield biases and discovery potential of current and next generation surveys to determine the demographics of exoplanets didn't think exoplanets had demographics but they do more broadly his interest revolve around the information content of large data sets Scott is a member of the science definition team the SD DTS for NASA's wide-field Infrared Survey telescope w first which many of you have are familiar with and as the chair elect for the NASA exoplanet exploration analysis group Scott is widely recognized within the community for his work he was 2009 recipient of the Helen B Warner prize of the American Astronomical Society received NSF career and PK's Awards was named a university distinguished scholar in 2016 and in 2017 he was awarded the NASA outstanding public leadership medal for his in recognition of his outstanding leadership as the exoplanet program analysis group chairperson having significant impact on NASA's search for exoplanets and life in the universe Scott God [Applause] those award events by the way they don't necessarily have the drama of the red carpet of the Grammys but they are far more important Awards far more and profound so and third up we have Courtenay dressing Cortney Cabana Cortney is an assistant professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley as an observational astronomer she has focused the reason her research on detecting and characterizing planetary systems orbiting nearby stars she's used telescopes on the ground and in space to search for planets probe their atmospheres measured their masses and constrained their bulk compositions courtney is curious about how planets form and evolve with time the frequency of planetary systems in the galaxy and the prospects for detecting life on planets outside our solar system near and dear to our hearts at the SETI Institute so welcome all of you the format to tonight this is this is the space telescope answer to The Bachelor okay and so we're gonna kick it off each of our bachelor and bachelorettes is going to then a very brief overview of the their mission concept their telescope and then we're going to sit down and have a conversation so first up will be Kimberly good evening and before I begin tonight you're gonna hear about three amazing Space Telescope's there's actually a fourth one that's not representative tonight it's called Lynx it is an x-ray telescope that will reveal the invisible universe and as you hear the three concepts tonight keep in mind there's also another one that's not represented I'm here to share with you about the origin space telescope but let's be a little bit take a step back and be a little bit of a soft philosophical origins is about where did we come from what is the origin of life's essential elements carbon oxygen nitrogen how did the universe evolved as life's ingredients for changing how do planets become habitable so they can support life how common would these life-bearing planets be these are questions are going to be answered by the origin space telescope so what you're seeing on the slide is a concept of a cold big sensitive and fast space telescope being cold at 4.5 kelvin makes it extremely sensitive with very low backgrounds big it has the same collecting area as the james webb space telescope 25 square meters sensitive this baby is a thousand times more sensitive than any prior infrared telescope and it's fast being infrared the way the observatory is going to be looking between 2.8 microns and 590 microns about half of life half of the light from stars planets galaxies is emitted at these wavelengths being fast it's designed for start to be scanning across the sky it will speed at 60 arc seconds a second in comparison James would would cover that in about two minutes so at 60 arc seconds a second about one arc amended a second it could cover the full moon in 30 seconds this is very powerful and transformative it is a discovery telescope the three orders of magnitude of sensitivity will open up a huge discovery space for all astronomy it will be positioned at l2 where a lot of the big telescopes are going it has only one deployable the Sun shield so it has become a much more compact but yet very powerful and agile telescope and it's serviceable NASA is embarking on developing the lunar gateway this could be a telescope that can be serviceable so I want to spend the rest of my pitch about the anchor themes behind the observatory so how do stars galaxies black holes and the elements of life form over the lifetime of the universe this is one of the anchor themes of the observatory our Milky Way 12 billion years old has taken a long time to become a spiral galaxy fueled with a central black hole but what about other galaxies what you're seeing here is a spectroscopic survey that is enabled because of its fast mapping capabilities we can do an unbiased deep survey of millions of galaxies for the astronomers in the audience this is what the Sloan Digital Sky Survey did for optical Astronomy we're going to be able to see the rise of metals the rise of dust the rise of organics and how that came to be the universe we have today so we'll be able to probe the universe from today to 500 million years after the Big Bang studying millions of galaxies spectroscopically their composition their star formation rate and have us understand how did life's ingredients involve over time essentially we've made a look-back machine a time machine to find out what happened to our origins a second anchor theme is looking at what are the conditions for making a planet habitable and in particular we're interested in the trail of water we have known that we're putting together pieces of the trail of water story but we don't really have a clear vision and so origins we'll look at the formation of water in the interstellar medium as the clouds are collapsing to form stars which is a short period of time only hundreds of thousands of years to the disks in which the planets are forming which is millions of years tens of millions of years in particular we're going to look for the snow line these are areas in a protoplanetary disk or planets could be forming we'll be looking at how waters even deliver to our own solar system amateur sail a solar system because if the earth formed within the solar within the snowline yet the water that on the earth has a signature as it came from beyond the solar no line we want to answer those questions so we're looking at paving a pathway to find water which is a life and abling ingredient through all phases from the birth of stars to the planetary systems and finally with this other spectrometer at the shorter wavelengths um at the sort of 2 to 20 micron we're going to address how common our life-bearing world's around M dwarf stars M dwarf stars are the most populous there's 75% of the stars in our Milky Way or M dwarfs we will build upon the discoveries of many planets around M dwarfs from Trappist Merce Kepler and other surveys that will come between now and 20 the 2030s when origins is flying we're going to look for bio-indicators water and carbon dioxide we're looking for bio signatures methane and zone whose presence there would indicate life and so three anchor this is the fingerprints of life-bearing worlds so in short origins will do a lot more it has a huge discovery space it's all about where do we come from and the evolution of life from the beginning of the epoch of realization which is 500 million years after the Big Bang to today we'll be looking at how the rise of metals the rise of dust how water is transported to habitable systems and how common they are so it will be a transformative observatory for the the greater all the Australia community and we're very excited that this will answer and transform the understanding of our cosmic origins thank you what do you think good pitch huh not bad all right Kimberly thank you very much and Scott you're up with habits okay so before I start I'm really glad that Kimberly mentioned this fourth study links all four studies have been going on now for over three years and they've involved hundreds of astronomers people working in for the at NASA people working in industry and well quite a bit of money as well and I want to say that to impress upon you that these are not simple back-of-the-envelope kind of studies these are real studies that have doesn't that where we've come up with specific science goals and then we've actually done the full tracing of how we can actually accomplish that goals what is the technologies that we need to do that what kind of telescope architecture do we need to be able to achieve those goals so what you see here is the hab exhibition and look and it's an artist's conception of course but it's based on actual computer-aided design drawings right there is the actual engineering extremely difficult engineering went into designing this particular mission and all four of these missions okay so these are not these are these are not just you know stories we're telling ourselves in this case in case of habits there's actually two components of it and I'll get back to that in a second hobb X has three main science goals and in a box itself sense for the habitable exoplanet Observatory so you might not be surprised that one of those science goals is to actually directly detect actually it wasn't supposed to do that directly detect and characterize potentially habitable planets the other is to understand those potentially habitable planets in the context of the planetary systems that they live in by then taking spectra and understanding the properties of a much broader suite of planets and then finally it'll be a successor to Hubble in the sense that they'll have sensitivity in the optical ultraviolet and near-infrared and enable many of the of the studies that we've seen come out of Hubble which has been which have been incredible and transformative but they will be actually even more powerful because Havoc's is actually a four meter telescope rather than a two point four meter telescope have X's basic philosophy has been to try to achieve these science goals and in particular the science goal of actually detecting a potentially habitable earth-like planet orbiting a sun-like star looking to see if that the planet is potentially habitable and looking for signatures of uh perhaps life we've been we've taken a philosophy of being fairly conservative and cost-conscious to try to do this with the minimum now amount of risk possible now in order to detect an earth-mass planet orbiting a sun-like star at a distance of typically through sort of 30 light years which is the typical distances we're gonna be looking at you have to suppress the light from That star by a factor of 1/2 one in 10 billion okay and that star that planet is located only 0.1 arc seconds away from it's a post star so the analogy is that it's like trying to look for a firefly about five feet away from an industrial searchlight that you would see in a Hollywood premiere except the searchlight in the Firefly tour in LA and you're standing in New York City so that sounds really hard but I actually went and looked up how luminous a Firefly was it turns out that's not so easy you can't just find it on Wikipedia I went and looked up how luminous searchlight was so I found some industrial owner's manuals and looked it up and I had to learn what a Ken doll was and it turns out that actually a Firefly is about a thousand times brighter compared to a searchlight that Firefly is compared then this earth is compared to the Sun so this problem is even a thousand times harder we have two ways we think we can suppress this light without in so getting rid of 10 billion photons and keeping that one photon from the planet one of them is called a star shade and that's what's illustrated here in this cartoon it literally is a large star shaped shade that would fly about a hundred thousand kilometers away from the telescope it's about the size of a baseball diamond of course you can't just throw that up in the air you have to have do fancy ways of unfurling it and we use techniques of origami to do that and so and and then you have to be able to deploy it the edges have to be manufactured to a micron they have to deploy it within a few millimeters and you have to make it align with the telescope but by a few meters that's and so that's the challenge that we face with the starshade but if you can do that that it suppresses the light from the star exceptionally well the second method which is a method that levar will actually also use to detect and characterize earth-like planets is apparently I have to agree to some iTunes why am I not seeing that okay oh come on really I don't see it here it's all the way right there it is how do i but I want to go left all right all right I'm just gonna go on okay so I didn't realize it it started okay so choreography it works differently in choreography what you actually do is you actually let the light from the star into the telescope okay and then what you do is you put essentially a small disc that would block the light in the central part where the star is to block the light from the star but since the planet is coming in light is coming in at an angle it will pass by the disc sounds pretty easy well the problem is that you actually again have to block 10 billion photons for every one photon from the from the planet and that means any imperfection in your optics will screw this up and will scatter light and you do not have to scatter many photons to make the planet defense essentially invisible so you have to do something very fancy again where you have this what's called a coronagraph that blocks the light and again if your what optics were perfect then you would be able to see the planet but because your optics are not perfect your wave fronts are are not stationary and so you have to do use fancy things like deformable mirrors to flatten out your wave fronts - then therefore make the light travel along the path that you need and you want so that you can block the light from the star and then not from the planet and so have X is going to use actually both of these technologies to try to detect and characterize earth-like planets and eventually look for signatures of habitability habitability so signatures of water vapor and atmosphere ozone things like that and also signs of life like ozone and oxygen and maybe even methane if we're exceptionally lucky if you're interested in wanting to know why we chose both technologies instead of one or the other I'm happy to answer that during the questions all right what do you think so did you like that one yeah it's the big shield I think it's the that's the real attraction here all right and Courtney great thanks I'll be telling you about the large UV optical infrared surveyor this concept is one of the four that you've heard about before and our mission is designed to allow us to do both general astrophysics and planetary science so we designed it as a large facility that was equally capable of detecting an earth-like planet around a sun-like star and telling us about how the universe formed and evolved in the first place I said it's large so how large is it let's go to earth orbit look at the Hubble Space Telescope and put them side-by-side to compare here we are in Earth orbit with the Hubble Space Telescope we're gonna zoom away and then we'll see a blue for those of you who've seen Star Wars might understand where this is coming from quite large what you're seeing there is actually the shield that we'll use to block the sunlight so it won't get into the telescope our telescope itself has two designs we have architecture a which is fifteen point one meters across that's pretty big and then we have architecture B which is eight meters across which is also big that's twice the size of Scott's telescope remarkable Star Wars isn't it and with those large telescopes what we can do is collect a lot of white that means we can search stars that are farther away and find a larger sample of Earth's it also means that we can collect light quickly and take very deep images just like the Hubble Deep Field only we can do it much better over larger parts of the sky and make it even prettier tote bags and scarves than the ones you purchased with Hubble images you can see that video and more at the California Academy of Sciences will leVoir we're going to take pictures that look like this Scott nicely explained choreography which is the technique that leVoir will use to take an image like this we'll use the coronagraph inside the telescope to block out the light from the star that particular instrument is called eclipse because we're eclipsing the star and that will allow us to see any planet that might be visible here this is what our solar system would look like if we were observing it with leVoir with a 12 metre telescope so that's smaller than our large architecture and bigger than our small architecture here you can see Venus close to the inner edge and that funky thing in the middle is showing that we've blocked out the star you're not seeing the star there you're seeing what's left over after we've removed the star light we also have earth nice there on the side and we have Jupiter when we take an image like this it's not just a single image and we're also not taking a picture of what the planet actually looks like Earth's and other planets aren't resolved we're just seeing a single point of light that's spread over multiple pixels in this image here what we can do then is for this image we can take a spectrum for each of those planets and look for signatures in the atmospheric spectrum we'll look for oxygen and ozone and methane and try to find things in combinations that wouldn't exist if they weren't being actively created with lawar we'll take a large sample of stars and look for all of them to try to figure out how common life is in the universe we'll be able to look at enough stars that if we don't find anything we will be able to place limits on the frequency of life in the universe that are quite meaningful hopefully though we'll get lucky and we'll find life on multiple planets we have a lot to consider here on the left you can see a plot showing the number of planets on which we expect to be able to take spectrum with leVoir on the left side that green bar shows that we'll find about 50 planets that are roughly earth sized earth temperature in the habitable zones of their stars that might be good candidates for life for each of those planets will take more detailed observations to look for those bio signatures the other red and blue bars show you that we'll find planets of a range of temperatures both hotter than the earth and colder than the earth and a range of sizes from things that are smaller than the earth all the way up to planets that are the size of Jupiter and for each of those planets we're going to learn a lot we'll be able to understand how the planetary systems form and evolve with time and try to figure out what makes our solar system different or similar to other planets there was a movie that was going to show on the right there which is why I advanced early if I can show it to you later here we're showing you that leVoir isn't just gonna tell us about planets far away from home it will also allow us to study the planets and the moons in our own solar system on the left here you see what Hubble can do when it looks at Europa and you probably know that there are really interesting plumes coming from Europa that might contain organics from a subsurface ocean be nice to be able to resolve those plumes like we can with leVoir on the right and do time monitoring to see exactly when they erupt and understand how the structure changes over time and maybe how the composition of the plumes changes with time we can do that with leaf wire and we can also study things like the atmospheres of Jupiter and they compared it to observations of planets far away and of course compare our own earth to observations of other potentially habitable worlds I'm incredibly excited about leVoir and I hope that you all are too Thanks so that's also pretty cool wouldn't you agree so it's a tough choice let me start with Kimberly and ask a question you talked about the operating temperature of the telescope space telescopes do have different operating temperatures and when you talk about the origins telescope it's going to be like four or five kelvin 4.5 yeah so what is the significance of that what does that enable that is gives it unique capability well thanks for the question and it's a huge deal and this is where the brain thinking of the architecture of origins realizing that we need to get cold James Webb is also an infrared telescope and it cools its instruments but it's telescope is passively cold and it gets to about 30 or 40 Kelvin when you get below to the lower temperatures we're reducing the background significantly our diameter of our telescope is five point nine meters we have the same collecting areas James Webb we're actually more sensitive James Webb at the longer wavelengths because as you go out to the longer infrared wavelengths the lower your background is the more sensitive you are with previous telescopes infrared telescopes have given us glimpses of the universe they have not been cooled the technology for cryocooler just highly mature there are a high technical technical readiness level so it is not a concern for the observatory and we have a design where we have redundancy in our cooling and we have different cooling phases but the cooling enables the sensitivity this factor of a thousand and sensitivity wonderful and now I've seen references to the size of the origins and I think the architecture is also similar to James Webb and and the leVoir or is it no it's it's now smaller and this is because we were being cost realists we live in a cost realism you know scenario had a very ambitious first origins concept which was a nine meter this is what we really wanted you know what we did an interesting good science trade study on what would still be three orders of magnitude than what we have today we were trying to give up six orders of magnitude and go to three orders of magnitude and so we shrank our telescope such that we don't have that the deployables of the petals or the Sun shields and all that stuff we actually fit monolithically although we're made up of segments in an SLS or a bf are from SpaceX we can launch in a single fairing without these deployables but yes our original concept was a lot more grand we took in cost realism and made some strategic choices and where the science discovery space is still maintained and that's the design that I'm showing so and so both leVoir and have XR operating in the infrared the optical and the UV and the near-infrared so only out to about two microns up to do so there's no overlap but when the wavelength range we notice T and Lou or inhabit right and that's because the different operating temperature and our design decision we're operating at a much higher temperature yeah we actually know a portion of the spectrum so HAP X will cover between about sorry 0.125 might microns to about two microns okay and towards the end of that that's where we start getting thermally background limited because our time our telescope is not so cool and I believe we're similar for right and depending on your science case you can go a little bit brighter if you have a writer object right okay and origins 2.8 to about 590 microns okay so out to the longer wavelengths right right okay so Scott I don't want to say that Kimberly sounded dismissive but somewhat suspicious of the star shield okay so let's let's the star shade yeah so there's there's two technologies here that we're talking about that that that all of these teams are talking about one is a Sun shield and that's the that's the that I think that is your one deploy one and that's that's to do the passive cooling and then you have active cooling if I understand exactly and for leVoir they have this this very large Death Star Destroyer sunshield we come in peace in science fiction no this is this very large Sun shield so that they can actually have a very large field of regard and not and not have the contaminating light from the Sun the Havoc's has a much more traditional sun shield where it's actually part of the telescope itself similar to things like Kepler and others and that's also where we get our power and then there's the star shade and that's something that is unique to have X this is the this is the the petal shaped thing that has to unfurl and would block the light from the parent star star shades are very nice because they're exceptionally good at blocking the light from the star because the light never from the star never enters the telescope the challenges are of course that you have to make it unfurl to this precision and you have to make it do formation flying and you have to manufacture those petals but if you think about it manufacturing a petal edge to a 1 micron when we're actually now able to take individual atoms and move them right is not actually that challenging so I would say that to the to the skeptics always good to be skeptic but the star shade technology has actually come a very long way and I just want to mention one of the things I think this is important for Lou far as well even 10 years ago we would not have been able to do probably any of these missions but for Havoc's in particular there's three things that we've learned that enable habits to be realizable in the next sort of few decades one is that Kepler's told us that small planets are common we did not know that this is also important for one of your pillars we did not know small planets are common so we now know that they're going to be targets out there in the case of habits and leVoir we also know that stars aren't so too dusty to hide their parent there are there planets we thought they might be now we know that there we aren't and the third thing and again I think this probably applies to OST as well is that our technology has come an enormous loan or very long way choreography the star shade technology I'm sure that the active and passive cooling technologies have come a long way due to focus investments by NASA and Industry such that these three missions are really things that we actually think we know how to do now we do need some more technology development but not an excessive amount I don't think right so an industry and as part of our reports we do submit a technology roadmap for the elements of each of these ambitious telescopes and which parts are unique that need that more development yeah because we're talking launch in the 2030s mid 2030s and that and that does make these studies somewhat unique compared to previous studies is that these really are Science and Technology definitions and teams and we're going from the science questions and we're mapping them all the way to the technologies and the architectures we need in order to answer those science questions and making sure that we're dotting all of our eyes and crossing all of our T's so your point about our ability to manipulate at the atomic level now okay so theoretically then like the the the star shade the technology behind the star shade isn't so bleeding-edge no it's not oh it used to be it used to do it right not anymore so maybe for each of you you could just briefly say for for the your particular instrument concept whether it has sort of technology development challenges in other words technologies that must be developed in order for this to work that don't yet exist and then what they are or if it well basically at the same stage that we're trying to do ambitious projects and some of my colleagues will talk about having a single tooth fairy or two tooth fairies where you can have one or two crazy things in your concept and everything else needs to pan out but when you think about it we're designing something that would launch in the mid to late 2030s and I have things in my apartment that I would never dreamed of owning 20 years ago so that it's back in my house which I never have dreamed of owning but anyway I always think more about the really powerful computer that fits in all of our pockets but the cats are nice too dogs were better I probably lost goes with that it's kind of agree why I've got an issue with a deadly war one of our big challenges is that we need to be able to do the style expression really well and Scott to discuss a lot of the challenges for how to do that one of those challenges is that we need to know exactly where all of the segment's in the mirrors are and we've developed technologies to do that but it's still tricky and we also need to have the telescope be extremely stable we actually need picometer stability so that's one of our biggest challenges the other big challenge for us is that we need to have very low reed nose detectors which means when we take an image it needs to be very clear and crisp and not have any fuzzy stuff that's produced by systematics and we think that we're on a path to be able to do both of those things and we've identified what needs to be done in the next 10 years to make a facility like leVoir buildable and flyable in the late 2030s yeah I will say that I think again I think this is true for all of the studies is that part of our studies is actually not just saying what technologies are at the bleeding edge right because all of us have technologies let's face it that are challenging we're not gonna lie to you suppressing starlight by a factor of 10 billion is kind of guy kind of crazy you think but we think we know how to do it and that's that's the thing is I mean as crazy as it sounds it's actually we're within shouting distance and being able to do it I will say that have X has taken as I said a more conservative philosophy where we've tried to minimize the number of technologies and so there have been several cases where we've had trades and where we would have had to adopt the technology that was lower what NASA calls technology readiness level you don't need to know what it means but it means more bleeding-edge we've chosen not to include that and we have it as an enhancing technology if there were funding to try to develop that technology so have X tends to have compared to leVoir and I'm not I am haven't done exactly the comparison to OSD fewer of these more difficult technologies we don't quote require quite the picometer stability it's hard it's you know it's tens of or hunt or 400 Pico meters but it's not picometer but that's intentional because and and we're gonna have to say this eventually so might as well start saying it now you may notice a lot of similarities between Havoc's and levar right in terms of the science that they're planning on doing their architectures are very different the way they look but the science are trying to do is very similar we're trying to be like the next great Observatory like Hubble but we're also trying to do this thing that we can only do for the first time in human history detect and characterize earth-like planets around sun-like stars and and so what we're but solovar and habits have been working the other now is fidelity the last three years to try to present these two missions as sort of ends of a buffet of options that can achieve this kind of science that depending on how brave or how much money you want to spend or whatever you might decide something on one end or something on the other end I firmly believe that that something like blue bar will eventually happen will it be the next thing I don't know and I personally and I'll just throw this out here right now I would love to see all four of these missions fly because they're all for do amazing science right and we do have a very complimentary of wavelength coverage be nice to see something like OST and then a have X loop war murder and origins are our biggest technology challenges our detectors so I had mentioned that the telescope's at four point four point five Kelvin and that's doable with with existing cryocoolers or the evolution of cava coolers our detectors are at milli Kelvin and so we have work to do with the different refrigerators that will cool down those detectors and that's on a technology path that's mapped out the other big challenge is a raise of detectors we have demonstrated the sensitivity of the tens of detectors we need for the science in single pixel right now and to do our mapping because we have this amazing telescope that can map all over the sky and take spectra and images we need to have a raise of these detectors and we need to put those arrays together and then they will generate heat and so we have to do this balance oh you're going to add more pixels with a lot more electronics we have to then dump all that cold that's all part of our so it's our technology readiness roadmap is getting lots of pixels and keeping them cold and we're doing that in a very incremental way right now I think it's fair to say that you know in defense of leading-edge technology which if you want to do something cool and new you you have to push the envelope right the Kepler space telescope I mean when bill Baruch II first proposed that the NASA they they told him he was crazy and it would never work that the technology didn't exist it took five efforts five times four bills to put that forward and finally get it funded so I think it's more than appropriate to be looking at technologies which which right now we kind of understand how to do them but but haven't yet developed them I'd like to throw it and I I don't think maybe this this was mentioned specifically but all four of these mission studies are paired with a NASA Center and though and of course NASA as we know are some of the best people in the world to be able to develop these kinds of technologies and enable these fantastic amazing missions that just floor you with the kind of science and discoveries that they make so it's not just a bunch of scientists sort of scratching their heads thinking wow let's you know do this and using duct tape or whatever there's actually real engineers that know how to do these things and understand these problems and how to solve them or at least ways in which they might be able to solve them and so that's that's an important component of these studies is working very closely with the engineers nASA has more advanced duct tape than almost anybody that works at cold temperatures duct tape is the first step though I will say I've seen so it's got I have another question for you and and I think maybe this comes in that the category of the g-wiz they could be really interesting for people to get an understanding of scale when you start talking about the star shade how large is it how far will it be from the telescope when actual images are being collected so give us a sense of that of that scale so it's roughly the size of a baseball diamond 52 meters that you can scale the size depending on the aperture of the telescope and exactly what your requirements are but that's roughly 52 meters from tip to tip and in terms of how far away you have to fly it has to be flown somewhere between 70,000 to 100 and kilometers away okay and then from the telescope from the telescope and then has to be aligned to within a few what a few basically feet in this direction a few millimeters in this direction so again this all sounds very hard because right now you can't you have to roll this thing up in a fancy way where it wants to unroll they've actually solved that problem it's pretty amazing I was in a lab at JPL where they have one of these things on a rolled up and it's being and it really wants it really wants to unroll so I asked the engineer as I said should I be afraid standing next to this thing because if one of these things breaks is this one of these petals gonna fly out and kill me and they're like now no no we got that all figured out but but yeah it's it's it's it's hot it's hard but a lot of it it's amazing how far we've come and we've now built half scale models of these petals that have the tolerances that we need in order to do this so so yeah and we've figured out how to roll them up using these techniques of origami such that they will naturally want to unroll by themselves to this precise shape and we've demonstrated that we we can repeat this over and over again and it'll always unfurl to exactly the tolerance we need of this one millimeter and the formation flying you might think is hard but if you've been familiar with the Lisa Pathfinder that was demonstrating formation flying as well because that was considered one of the tall poles of Lisa and it was fabulously successful so we've made a lot of progress well we've got new horizons within 2200 miles of the surface of this object million miles away it's pretty miraculous absolutely well I don't want the starshade to dominate the conversation but it is interesting that what sounds like the more sort of mechanical physical thing here is is garnering much of the interest you know the rest is just optics electronics detectors you know for the mission without the starshade but you have to wait for the start you need to get into position that question yeah I said I'll answer that question yeah so how long does it take to set it up yeah so so star shades are great except when they're not crafts are great when they're not so the bat the star shades are great because they do have they do are very good at blocking out light and a lot of these these issues are really just kind of mechanical or engineering not so much not so much really technology development but um but yes you have to move it's a big thing it's a big gyroscope if you're thinking about it cuz we're spinning it too and then you have to move it all around because the stars are all around the sky so we can really only have and then it's your the tyranny of the rocket equation the more fuel you put on the more fuel you need the more fuel you put on the more food you need etc and so we can only move this thing around to about about a hundred times before we run out of fuel that's why working with the coronagraph is great although it doesn't suppress light nearly as well oka then it's a lot harder and you have to make your telescope more stable in order to correct these things like the wavefront it's very nimble because it's in your telescope so you can just point wherever you want so we have a strategy where we point at a bunch of stars find the or potentially earth-like planets move the star shade to those systems that we think might have an earth-like planet take the spectra and see if indeed it does have these biomarkers OST is even better shape they're already gonna know we're there to our targets art and thanks to tests and earth and these other these other systems like that so how long and this is the question I had and and play was asking this question from our our audience our virtual audience how long will it take to reposition the star shade to another target a few months a few months a month a month or so but meanwhile the the telescope is still able to do sign me meanwhile the rest of the time you can either use the chronograph to look and characterize both earth earth-like planets and larger planets as Cortney talked about I mean our bar chart does not look as impressive as theirs right the blue bar is a much much more ambitious and much more capable mission obviously but and getting the red wavelengths for a lot of planets yeah so but but but but like Courtney said you know there's there's other half of the science case that maybe if you're not interested in planets you're not as interested in but but that but you know we can do everything almost everything that Hubble can do except better because we're four meters and levar can do everything that Hubble can do except a heck of a lot better because you know there are nine meters old / 15 meters and oh STI they does the Herschel is the closest thing we've ever had and it's not even close it's not even close and we're in this transformative realm that we don't really know what we're gonna see was the original scope three orders of magnitude better Herschel which was an ESO telescope that was our best far infrared telescope to date so leVoir looks like the James Webb Space Telescope but bigger right a much bigger right is that the the the primary differentiator is this just you know James Webb on steroids or is there much more you know now so we are building off some of the lessons learned from James Webb in particular being really careful about making sure we're thinking about all of the nitty-gritty details that when we do have a cost estimate it's as accurate as possible and we also the name leVoir includes the UV and the optical as well so with James Webb we'll do a lot of great science in the near infrared and some of the obstacle but we won't have the ability to look at the universe with ultraviolet eyes and we need to do that to really understand stars and to understand galaxies and it'll be really sad when Hubble goes offline if we don't have an ability to look at the universe that way all right so we're gonna open this up to audience questions in one second I'm gonna give each of our scientists an opportunity to give one short statement about what's the key differentiator what's the key so what about their mission that should really be the reason why you say up and stand up and say I'm I'm in I'll pay for that let's start with given oh well origins will give us definitive new understanding of our cosmic where we came from the beginnings of these elements and that's pretty good yeah and it is an observatory for a whole range of Astrophysical phenomena we're doing solar system we're doing stars planets pre planets exoplanets galaxies all the way to the backbone would you say it's it's more diverse in its science mission than it is it has a very broad science and we're really excited with the gravitational wave astronomy that's emerging we'll be able to do those out those follow-ups and understand a lot of physics because we'll be able to study the heat and the thermal emission of black holes merging so we can contribute to these emerging Sciences too it's very diverse and any truth to the rumor that Dan Brown named his book origins after the telescope yeah all about where we came from all right Scott you're up so Havoc's will allow us for the first time in human history to take the first step at being able to go and find the pale blue dot dots and Carl Sagan's words the earth-like planets around the Sun like SARS take their spectra look for see if they're potentially habitable and look for signs of inhabitants of simple cell simple simple life and it will also be a great observatory in following in the tradition of Hubble that's a pretty good pitch all right Courtney leVoir is also a great observatory I'm designed to answer the questions we have today as well as the questions that we will discover in the 2030s and 40s it's serviceable and upgradable and could have an operational lifetime of a hundred years and answer a variety of questions and a wide range of astrophysics will find planets around other stars will characterize them will study entire planetary systems will also look at galaxies and understand our universe a little bit better and what I like best about leVoir is that I'm excited about the mission but so are my extra galactic astronomy friends and I think if we're gonna build a big flag to it mission it has to serve the whole community and levar will excellent all right so the coolest telescope literally is origin so alright show hands who's four you can only pick one who wants to go with origins alright a lot of lot of support for the cool telescope how about habits the pale blue dot yeah it's pretty even a little maybe a little edge to origins in lieu foir okay alright well so we'd like to give you a chance to ask this esteemed panel some questions if you'd like to ask a question just please line up behind the microphone here I would ask to try to keep your questions short and succinct please try and address them to one individual and and name that person so they can respond to you and you know be mindful that we'll probably have a number of people who'd like to ask and yes speak into the microphone as as best you can so everybody can hear you well thank you uh I'm going to violate your rule because I want a desk a custom ated cost from each of you and given that James Webb notoriously had some cost overruns what is your strategy for managing for cost management alright entry cost and cost management strategy so I'll start I don't know and I wouldn't tell you if I did and I'm pretty sure they'll say the same thing right but just wait and the gila learned from the decadal survey how much how much the independent entity will cost these things and that's what really matters in terms of keeping the cost to where we think we it is that's why we're doing these technology studies that's why we have these technology roadmaps that's why these studies have been going on for three and by the time they finish three and three quarters years is because we are really dotting all of our eyes and crossing our T's and making sure we really know that when we say we can do this or we will be able to do it with this investment of technology money that we really really will be able to accomplish that so when do you submit the stdt it will include a budget it will but you don't have those budgets yet I we do not have budgets and then undergo an independent cost assessment by an Aerospace Corporation because we're trying to build something for the very first time yet we have a little bit more knowledge basically what we went through with James Webb but each of the telescope's designs are also different right so it is on you know under a lot of scrutiny good question all right next up hopefully a couple brief ones can you use the moon or other planets as star shades and can you feel the better reaction wheels better build a better better reaction wheels so telescopes don't die the moon's really bright yeah I can answer the reaction wheels have X does not have reaction wheels we are using we are using thrusters specifically because reaction wheels have this bad property that they can you hit resonances and your telescope vibrates which makes it really hard to do choreography yeah cost cap for this mission and the missions you're thinking of with the reaction wheel issues the discovery I actually don't know what is what is always see using well we're using reaction wheels and also a variety of different other systems because we need to be fast to scan fast and to dump that momentum and so there's a lot of over engineering into to make sure that those are not on the critical path for us because we want to be scanning the sky so we want to be moving a lot great question alright thanks for the good discussion about the science the information you can get from direct imaging versus spectroscopy for example good question so the question was what's the difference of the science we can gain from direct imaging versus spectroscopic analysis right so in this era for the 2030s we're thinking of doing direct imaging but also taking spectra of those same planets today from the ground people are doing direct imaging and finding planets that are much more massive than Jupiter typically much farther away from the star than Jupiter is and also extremely young and they're starting to do spectroscopy but they're getting very coarse spectra that looks a little bit more like photometry so you get maybe five or six points across your spectrum in a handful of cases it's higher resolution you can start to see more features for us though getting the spectra is really useful because we can see which molecules we have in the planet and we are using a the transit technique where we're looking at when the planet goes in front of the star and also when it goes behind so we can get a primary and a secondary transit so we can actually understand the molecules in the atmosphere because we can see on the edge but we can also assess the temperature of the body as well and that's helpful for folding in the models of whether water would be in a liquid form so specters telling us composition but we can also use the technique to get temperature as well and leave Warren habits can do that as well for the sun-like stars with earth-like planets will primarily do direct imaging but for M dwarfs all the stars we can do the transfer so the exoplanet community as a whole I think this is fair to say not not not you it's not you Nana slipping in but it's probably the majority opinion feel like both of these paths one is called the small star opportunity where we try to look for potentially habitable planets around low-mass stars which are the most common stars in the galaxy and then eventually go and try to do this with the using something like jato vesti and then in the future maybe OST and then also doing direct imaging of spectra of earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars so those are sort of two paths you can go by according to Led Zeppelin anyway and I think we should and I and most of my exoplanet colleagues think we should do both there's one pot that's open to us right now and then the hab X and Louvre our path will be open to us in the future right and there's also a bunch of telescopes that we're building on the ground that are 30 metres across we haven't talked about which we have yeah but they can take images in spectra of planets in the habitable zones of M Dwarfs I mean images are spectacular looks like wow you can see the planet but Wow spectroscopy gives you composition and a lot of a lot more information yeah just because they're both will give a spectroscopy that's a very essential point to make yeah it's just around different types of stars for the most part so Courtney thanks for the lead-in to my question in addition to the space telescopes that your teams are working on we have a number of ground-based efforts the 30-meter telescope the extremely large telescope and so on could you say more to compare and can I asked the science that you know the two types of telescopes will do I think having both of them will really enrich in our scientific experience because from the ground we have to deal with whether you can build the best telescope in the world but if it's raining you're not opening especially not the best telescope in the world and from the ground you also have to deal with the moon getting the way you have to deal with the fact that the Earth's in the way some of the times we have limited viewing opportunities and these transits of planets and the habitable zones of sun-like stars happen once per year for M dwarfs you have more opportunities but it's still hard so direct imaging is useful because you're less time sensitive but when you observe you can't do it all the time that you have a broader range options and you also from the ground can't see all of the wavelengths there are certain things that our atmosphere blocks so you have to go to space to do certain types of science it is possible to detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a planet on the ground from Earth but it's really hard because we also have oxygen in our own atmosphere so to do that for an earth-like planet it is easier to do from space and if you're trying to study a planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star we don't think we can reach the contrast required to block the Starlight from the ground yes so this 10 billion factor is probably not possible to do from the ground I did want to throw in just since I'm from the Midwest for those of you that were that felt like you had to like go through this horrible weather conditions to get here Wow when they told me that my flight was delayed SFO because of weather I was laughing we had six inches of snow in Columbus Ohio last week well you had the polar vortex oiled up thank you for coming the weather and origins will be complementary to the ground-based you can't do the far infrared from the ground cause here is atmosphere blocks but with these 30 meter telescopes and their studies and extra galactic science were very complimentary looking at something you got to do both I mean I mean one is you know you can as technology evolves you can put new backends and new detectors new electronics which is tough to do once you've got a telescope in space but the space will give you opportunities they can't possibly do from ground-based so both are good sir a little surprised that stars shaped like the Sun on the Raisin Bran box a wide shape like that yeah I really don't understand why you have these like great things around it's a great question I you might think it would just be a disc right so okay so the issue is that when the light hits the edge of that disc it it de fracks and it actually diffracts exactly to the center so if you actually had a disc like that and you pointed it and you put it at the star you would have an extremely bright spot right at the center exactly where you don't want it so if you look at those petals you can imagine that every where the light hits it it diffracts it away from the telescope right that's how the edges are shaped and so they have a very specific mathematical form called the hyper gaussian if you care that is designed to diffract all the light away from the telescope not into your telescope I'd still recommend you you try to get the Raisin Bran guys at the space Daisy I like I've been doing my job better I would have asked that already very good questions we're at l2 nice and far away explain baby we're all we're in the sun-earth l2 okay so we're out at lunar distance we're very far away I think it's about three months to get there we're all at l2 we're all were all at Sun or l2 and so for those who don't know it's it's one of the little garage points that is a relatively quiet and stable space that's on the other side of the earth from the Sun so we have a video showing that on our website and you should definitely watch it it's set up like the James Webb deployment but it's actually a little bit simpler and if you were curious about how it works in real life we have a Lego model that you can find on Twitter that deploy is basically the same way but it requires human intervention because of gravity yeah that person was supposed to be calculating yields for us but instead was built a lego model never bike races over for habits used the only the moment main deployment is asunción so the starshade and you've seen that already and our deployment is the sunshield so we stack is a single entity in the parent faring of SLS or VFR and then as we launch the fairy comes off and then our shield just rolls out just sort of it's concave that's it and then we have an aperture cover that we toss away oh yeah we do that to the camera lens that lens off the camera next up so this being setting I think I'd like to ask about life your thoughts as a panel where your thoughts between seeing like what we'll see first you know artificial like a Dyson Sphere organic is kind of like a signature or nothing at all so here's my opinion it's not always popular in astronomy is that the way I think that these three missions are going about it is to try to apply the scientific method so you know first we found out that there were wow there are planets around other stars and we found out that there's actually a lot of small planets around other stars eventually we'll figure out how frequent solar systems architectures like ours with rocky planets inside gas giants outside our we'll find earth-like planets then we'll try to study their atmospheres and see if they have life so that's kind of doing the scientific method step by step I personally believe in like what I would call a balanced portfolio so I think that you should put a small amount of your investment in very a high risk but high payoff activities so I personally think that that you should that we as as a science that's looking for life should and back in fact invests at least some fraction of our money in this what I would think what I think is a fairly uncontroversial statement a little bit more high risk but certainly would be amazingly transformative to all of human and humans if if was actually successful that's my opinion you if you want to weigh in as well it's a good question I agree and I think that for things like subtle life detection of signatures and planetary atmospheres having a large number of planets will help us understand what we're seeing so if we only had one planet where we saw a hints of life we could come up with a bunch of theories to explain that one planet but that's more dangerous than having 50 planets where for each of those planets we came up with the theory and those theories have to work together in tandem to explain the whole set of observations we have I also think that in the future we're going to need to work even more closely with our biologists and geologists and chemists friends that we understand what life is from a biological perspective not just a circle we can have blinders on for identifying a priori what the signatures of life is and we've designed our instruments to measure the methane and the ozone and chosing the wavelengths to isolate those molecules but most likely we're gonna get spectra we don't understand right and that is going to be where we're going to need laboratory experiments to put lots of different types of chemistry together and then we may even lead to Alawite much wider discussion about what are the signatures of life I probably don't have to tell this audience but you know when I started this three and a little over years ago I was not up on the current state of astrobiology I won't be very frank about that and I'm a little know a little bit more but enormous am I said I had talked about a lot of things that have happened over the last 10 years that make these kinds of studies possible and one of them is that astrobiology has developed in twe is into amazing vibrant multidisciplinary science where people are really starting to try to understand what are the false positives what are the false negatives and and really trying to help us craft our experiments so that we can address these questions because I agree with you we're probably just not going to understand we're gonna get some spectra that we just won't know all the features and we're gonna model the heck out of it and then we're gonna have to have safety in numbers we're gonna have to have some statistical samples in order to make some sort of headway so the next question is from someone who knows a little bit of something about the quest for life in the universe penny Boston actually heads NASA's astrobiology Institute so penny yeah your turn I'm refraining from asking master biology but can we ask you ask I'm sure so with my skeptical cynical NASA bureaucrat hat on we have hats for purchase I have a whole wardrobe you know and living through the era of James Webb as we are all painfully doing how will your different missions fare with a radical D scope how much science can you do if I cut you off at the knees war we're in a different position than the other studies because Luke Warren habits were initially conceived as like two opposites of what you could do for an admission that does both exoplanets in general astrophysics so if you cut us in half you end up with half x so we are studying eight other architectures each of which are either smaller an aperture than the four meter so our main architecture our favorite architecture preferred architecture is a four meter hybrid a hybrid meta may mean cronograph and starshade with also these general observatory instruments we are setting eight out of there architectures that are either smaller in aperture or don't have the star shade or don't have a coronagraph those really able to allow you to relax and and get rid of some of the lower tech mountain the more risky technologies but they don't achieve the full complement of science that the our preferred architecture does so all of your architectures though still involve this the star Daisy the star shape that starts to no no no some of them don't just run aground right yeah exactly because the star shade is to be honest one of our more lower it's a more nascent technology than some of our other technologies I followed it since its birth and on origins we went through a massive discovery when we from our grand design to this more still very effective concept we also have a disco path and one of them is trading aperture how small can we go we're at five point nine meters once you go slower some your science goes and so we had a degradation of our science to preserve the exoplanet science we need to stay at about five point three meters to preserve our extra galactic cosmic survey we can go down to three meters because we still have these three orders of magnitude justif hits the science level different times you lose the exoplanets exoplanets Azhar is our highest bar that keeps us as big as we are right now other D scopes we can do it we've explored raising our temperature we the higher we go say we go to 6 Kelvin we start having a degradation at our longest wavelengths and so that becomes a trade we want to preserve that as much as possible because that is truly our our leap forward yeah thank you very much thank you yeah the I think the interesting thing about D scoping is you know I it maybe it's it's okay as a concept for NASA and Penny know something about about that I don't want to be on the plane however that was a result of a discussion process all right time for one more question how will the way forward be impacted by the success or failure of the James the timing is a bit awkward because James Webb isn't supposed to start until spring 2021 and we're doing the 2020 decadal survey so a lot of the discussions will happen before we know whether James Webb will launch successfully but my guess is that if James Webb flies and is successful which I think it will be I think it's gonna be a tremendous success we landed a sky crane on Mars we can do this then that will be a nice sense of optimism for the community I think right now we're at the low point in terms of people's regard for flagship missions because they feel frustrated about all the money and time sunk into James Webb and they haven't seen the science yet but the science is going to be fantastic if James Webb is unsuccessful then we're gonna have a more pessimistic era but I think that even that would come to an end eventually and I'm pretty I'm pretty much at the start of my career as a scientist so I have faith but also one of these things fly she does she does make me you know not you know get really depressed because she's always so chipper III agree with everything she said I will just emphasize one more time that the way we are going about these studies is to try to minimize as much as possible the the skepticism about whether or not we can actually achieve them because we really are really looking at them and in extremely fine detail and being very very careful so if any mission were to convince a decadal survey that we really know what we're talking about and we can't achieve these things I think these four mission studies would would be able to do that they're they're healthy reminder that we know less about the universe now than we think we claimed we do and we have a lot more questions to be answered and James Webb is gonna answer a lot and there's still gonna be a lot more you know that's the answer I mean that's us NASA is supposed to be inspiring right I think I think we all in one point in our lives were and and still for many of us still are inspired by the things that NASA has achieved and and so that's why I'm so excited about all these mission concepts because they really are incredible and in the new frontiers that they open up the questions that they can answer things we've been wondering about for centuries we can finally answer them if we just have the wherewithal and the you know just pluck eNOS to just go and do that absolutely well that's a great way to end I would ask you to join me in thanking our panel for what I thought was a wonderful [Applause]

Channel: SETI Institute

Views: 25,851

Rating: 4.8186665 out of 5

Keywords: NASA, SETI, space telescope, Origins telescope, HabEx telescope, LUVOIR telescope, exploration

Id: kEECPKLHwl8

Length: 73min 30sec (4410 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019