Tale of Two telescopes: Exoplanets. Hubble Space Telescope-- WFIRST.
I'm Aki Roberge and I'm an astrophysicist at NASA's Godda rd Space Flight Center.
Hi I'm Nikole Lewis I'm an assistant professor at Cornell University and I'm
an exoplanetary scientist. The very first project that I ever did when I
started graduate school was used data from the Hubble Space Telescope and I
checked my records and that was 1997. So I am definitely what you would call
"Hubble hugger," one of the astronomers who had NASA's Great observatories like
Hubble around pretty much for their entire careers. So I've been working with
the Hubble Space Telescope for almost a decade now actually using it to study
exoplanet atmospheres. I think I first started working on WFIRST about, let's see it
was about four, four- five years ago now and so I'm involved with one of the
teams that is --the science teams for the coronagraph instrument. So I've been
working on WFIRST now for a little over four years. I started back in about
2015 we're getting into the fifth year now when they started the science
investigation teams. It's really important to understand that Hubble
wasn't designed to study exoplanets at all we didn't even know about them that
they existed when Hubble was designed and launched, so the fact that we can
study exoplanets with Hubble is pretty awesome. With Hubble we're really looking
at these planets that are on short-period orbits that are sometimes
called transiting exoplanets and often we're looking at light that's passing
through these planets atmospheres as they pass in front of their host star.
WFIRST on the other hand is an exoplanet discovery machine, it's the machine you'd
use like like Kepler was, to like just find out that hey there's a planet
around that star. Now with WFIRST it's really going to leverage different
methodologies to look at exoplanets and it's gonna look at planets that are much
farther away from their host stars. It has two different methods which one is
microlensing that will help us to complete the census
of exoplanets in our galaxy and the other will be enabled through the corona
coronagraphic instrument which will actually take images of planets that are you know
a little bit farther away from their stars compared with the ones that we use
Hubble to study. What I've learned from working on Hubble is that, first of all
it's sort of expect the unexpected, and you can use a tool that was built for
one thing if it's you know a general purpose tool like NASA's Great
observatories were, you can use it for other things. Hubble was never designed
to look at exoplanets and so we always have to use it in a very creative way to
do the science we want to do. WFIRST of course is getting designed to study
exoplanets from the get-go but I think we're still going to have to find
creative ways to use WFIRSTto better understand exoplanets.
Explroe NASA.