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NASA Scientist to Reveal Latest News About JPL’s “Final Frontier” Discoveries

Published on Thursday, January 12, 2017 | 6:31 am
 
JPL’s Deputy Chief Program Scientist Dr. Eric Mamajek

Discovering thousands of new planets throughout the universe has become the new norm for scientists who say that increases the possibility of finding habitable worlds similar to our own, and that along with these discoveries comes recent evidence suggesting the ingredients of life are omnipresent. These alien worlds that once seemed impossibly far, far away are steadily being explored in greater detail thanks to cutting edge technology and sci-fi inspired spacecraft developed right here at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

JPL’s Deputy Chief Program Scientist Dr. Eric Mamajek will tell all about the future of space exploration and otherworldly findings at a special two part presentation that will take place Thursday and Friday at select locations open to the public.

“It’s hard to believe that it’s been less than a generation since these discoveries. Now we know thousands of extra exoplanetary systems. The numbers have exploded in the last ten years. We’re seeing a great variety of planets that we haven’t seen up close in our own solar system,” explained Mamajek who leads the NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program at JPL.

These mysterious planets, known as exoplanets, that orbit stars keep popping up in the viewfinders of massive telescopes open up a world of wonder for scientific discovery when considering the fact that nearly every star you see in the night sky probably has exoplanets orbiting it, according to Mamajek.

The number of confirmed exoplanets is now just over a few thousand. Their discoveries have yielded terms that would have sounded alien to astronomers before the 1990’s: Hot Jupiters, Pulsar planets, Super-Earths, Mini-Neptunes, Circumbinary planets—terms that seem to fit perfectly in classic sci-fi movies.

The impressive development of interstellar technology has greatly contributed to NASA/JPL’s final frontier discoveries.

“The exoplanets are being found through multiple methods and each one has their strengths and they are basically probing the planets in different ways. We have a good handle on physics, computers are getting faster, we’re able to machine parts smaller and into higher precision and more. The ingredients for life seem to be everywhere in the universe. It’s getting interesting quickly,” explained Mamajek.

Scientists have only been able to discover planets around other stars for the past couple of decades. Mamajak pointed out that this week is the 25th anniversary of scientists discovering exoplanets around a Pulsar, or a highly magnetized rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation in the form of radio waves.

Trends are emerging among exoplanet populations which put our own solar system in context, according to a press release, and most exoplanetary systems appear to be very unlike our own.

Many exoplanets were found by using the doppler spectroscopy method that measures the light spectrum of stars and the most recent and successful method since the new millennium, the transit method, which looks for signs of planets blocking stars.

“It’s a very good method for finding planets very close into their star,” said Mamajek.

The Kepler Mission, NASA Discovery mission #10, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets, according to the NASA website.

Kepler finds planets by looking for tiny dips in the brightness of a star when a planet crosses in front of it and it has served as one of the most effective ways to discover exoplanets, according to Mamajek.

“We want to be able to see the light from earth-like planets around nearby stars and that’s a very challenging experiment. The planets are billions of times fainter than stars,” explained Mamajek who compares the challenge to looking for a moth flying near a lighthouse.

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is a NASA observatory designed to perform Wide Field imaging and surveys of the near infrared sky and is currently in its early phase and is ready to launch in the mid 2020’s, according to Mamajek.

The current design of the mission makes use of an existing 2.4m telescope, which is the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope. WFIRST is the top-ranked large space mission in the New Worlds, New Horizon Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“In that mission we should be able to image some Neptune-like planets around stars, but to get to the next level—to actually see little blue dots from Earth-like planets—that’s another level of complexity and that’s probably in the 2030’s and beyond,” said Mamajek.

One of the most far out and interstellar technology that mimics the aesthetics of something from Sci-fi movies JPL is developing is called the Starshade that would be used to help block out light from a star and detect exoplanets.

“They’re developing the concept of launching a separate spacecraft that would unfurl into what looks like a huge sunflower about the size of a football field. They see a technical path for this. This could realistically happen in the late 2020’s,” explained Mamajek.

Designed to work in conjunction with a space-based telescope, the starshade is able to position itself precisely between the telescope and the star that’s being observed and can block the starlight before it even reaches the telescope’s mirrors, according to NASA.

With the starlight suppressed, light coming from exoplanets orbiting the star would be visible. This technology would allow astronomers to take actual pictures of exoplanets – images that could provide clues as to whether such worlds could support life as we know it.

“That’s the future. They see the technical hurdles ahead and there’s some very interesting concepts on the table,” said Mamajek. “What you see is that if there are technical challenges, eventually humans will deal with it.”

The space age is in full effect and is only getting more advanced as time goes on.

“I think the prospects for finding habitable planets are very good. It’s been amazing what questions we’ve been able to answer over the last couple of decades and it will be interesting to see which answers we can come up with in the next decades from our scientific pursuits,” said Mamajek.

The public is invited to join Dr. Eric Mamajek in his two part lecture “Exoplanets: The Quest for Strange New Worlds” on Thursday at 7pm at The von Kármán Auditorium at JPL located at 4800 Oak Grove Drive and Friday at 7pm at The Vosloh Forum at Pasadena City College located at 1570 East Colorado Blvd.

For more information visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures_archive.php?year=2017&month=1.

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