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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, March 18, 2002
Stellar Interferometry began more than 80 years ago with the pioneering measurement of the diameter of Betelgueuse by Michelson and Pease using a 20 foot beam mounted at the top of the 100" Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson. Essentially no other work was done in this field until the 1960's when Hanbury-Brown and his colleagues developed and used the Intensity Interferometer at Narrabri, Australia, to measure the diameters of a number of important hot stars. The modern period of Stellar Interferometry really began in the 1970's with the successes of three or four small research groups in the US and Europe, and scientific and technical progress in the field has been outstanding, particularly in the last decade. This has lead to the development of two major ground based facilities: NASA's own Keck Interferometer and ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, and a number of space interferometers such as the Space Interferometer Mission (SIM) and the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), among others. I will review the principles, history, and scientific progress in the field both on the ground and in space, and I will discuss a mission concept under development here at NASA Goddard, the Fourier-Kelvin Stellar Interferometer, a near-term mid-infrared imaging interferometer, which can serve as a scientific and technical pre-cursor for some of the more ambitious concepts being discussed within the Astronomical and NASA communities.
William C. Danchi received a Bachelor of Physics with Honors from the California Institute of Technology in 1978. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 1983 under the direction of thesis advisor Professor Michael Tinkham. His post-doctoral research was with Professor Charlie Townes at the University of California at Berkeley, where he held the L.W. Frohlich Research Fellowship of the New York Academy of Sciences. He worked at the Unversity of California at Berkeley during the next 16 years, while he rose through the ranks of the Research Faculty until he was a Senior Space Fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory. Following this he began employment in the Infrared Astrophysics Branch at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as an Astrophysicist, and he is currently the Acting Branch Head.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Dr. Eugene Waluschka
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