Home
QR Code

Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 21, 2016 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Jason Kalirai

"The Best of Both Worlds - WFIRST as Astronomy's First High Resolution and Wide View Telescope"

ABSTRACT -- For 25 years, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has transformed our understanding of most areas of modern astrophysics. The combination of Hubble's exquisite image quality and photometry depth are unsurpassed by even the largest ground-based telescopes, and so it remains today as astronomy's premier tool to observe the Universe. While Hubble has answered countless questions about our origins, its discoveries have also motivated new challenges that now require a new generation of technologies. Building on Hubble's Foundation, NASA is current developing two telescopes to extend Hubble's legacy into new dimensions; deeper with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and wider with the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST).

WFIRST is an unprecedented mission. For the first time ever, we will have views of the Universe at the same resolution as Hubble, but over fields that are 100x larger. The most rare and interesting sources, such as the earliest galaxies in the early Universe, will become common. This scientific breakthrough will provide a deep context into most areas of astrophysics, from understanding how our Solar System came to be and whether it is truly unique to exploring the nature of the dark energy that is driving the expansion of the Universe. Complementing its tremendous wide field of view instrument, WFIRST also includes a new technology that represents a pathfinder for finding another Earth like planet in the Milky Way galaxy. This technology, a high-performance coronagraph, will be capable of dimming starlight by a factor of 1 billion to directly image faint planets. In this presentation, I'll outline the remarkable technology and scientific promise of WFIRST, and discuss how this mission complements other future telescopes such as JWST and the next generation of giant ground based observatories.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Jason Kalirai is a research astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore MD, and recent recipient of Maryland's Outstanding Young Scientist award. He obtained his PhD in astrophysics in 2004 from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada. His research interests include studying the formation and evolution of stars and nearby galaxies using powerful ground and space-based telescopes. He is a frequently user of the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Kalirai is also the Project Scientist for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the soon to launch successor to Hubble, and has been actively involved in shaping NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) for the past several years. He is currently the PI of a Science Investigation team on the WFIRST Formulation Science Working Group. For his research, Dr. Kalirai recently received the 2014 American Astronomical Society Newton Lacy Pierce prize, given by the society to one astronomer under the age of 36 per year for outstanding achievements in observational astrophysics. He has also been selected as one of Baltimore's "Top 40 under 40" and was selected as a Kavli Fellow in 2014. In addition to his research program, Dr. Kalirai is very active in communicating science to the general public and has led more than 100 public outreach events in the past 5 years. More information is available on his website at www.jasonkalirai.com or through his twitter handle, @JasonKalirai.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov