(music)
Telescopes generally come into two different flavors. You have really powerful big
telescopes, but those telescopes see a tiny part of the sky or
telescopes are smaller and so they lack that power but they can see big
parts of the sky. WFIRST is the best of both worlds. WFIRST
is the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. What I think of WFIRST is doing
is building on what where the two great successes astronomically
of the 1990's in the last decade, that is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
and the Hubble Space Telescope. WFIRST is a NASA observatory
that has the top ranking of the National Academy of Sciences
to launch in the twenty twenties. It has the same image precision
and power as the Hubble Space Telescope but with one-hundred
times the area of sky that is used. Looking at a large fraction of the sky
allows you to get a more complete accounting. For example the stars in the Large Megellanic
Cloud, which is the nearest galaxy to us or the stars in the galactic bulge;
so you can do a much more complete accounting in a much shorter amount of time.
The particular thing I'm interested in using WFIRST for,
is to actually do a statistical census of planetary systems in
our galaxy. And what we're looking for is gravitational microlensing events, these are
cases when another start passes in front of our line of sight to a background star
and it makes that background star get a little bit brighter due to the gravity of that
foreground star, and that allows us to find planets. What WFIRST
will do is it will have what we call a coronagraph. A coronagraph lets us
image and characterize really dim planets,
next to very bright stars. No matter how good a telescope
that you build, its always going to have some residual errors. This is going to be the
first time that we're going to fly an instrument that contains these high format deformable
mirrors, that are going to let us correct for errors in a telescope, that's never
been done in space before. WFIRST will allow us
to potentially make groundbreaking discoveries in finding
out what dark energy is. So this will tell us
if dark energy is an unknown form of energy or if its a modification
of general relativity. Single WFIRST images will contain
over a million galaxies and we can't categorize
and catalog those galaxies ourselves. Citizen science allows
interested people in the general public to solve scientific problems
and so one of the things that I'm really excited about is enabling this bridge
where the general public can get involved in doing actual
science. For me, its really an exciting opportunity to play
a significant role in a mission that I think will be
one of the most powerful telescopes that we have in the twenty twenties;
and will be some of the most important things our country does in space in that
time frame.
(beeping)