Patricia "Padi" Boyd

"EarthShine: Observing our world as an exoplanet from the surface of the Moon"

ABSTRACT -- NASA's return to the Moon coincides with explosive growth in exoplanet discovery. Missions are being formulated to search for "habitable" planets orbiting other stars, making this the ideal time to deploy an instrument suite to the lunar surface to help us recognize a habitable exoplanet when we see it. The EarthShine mission concept is a technically mature three-instrument suite designed to observe the whole Earth through a wide variety of illumination phases as an exoplanet proxy, by collecting images and spectra in the visible through infrared, from the unique vantage point of the Moon. EarthShine data could help validate and improve models currently in use for designing missions to image and characterize exoplanets, thus informing observing strategies for NASA's flagship mission to directly image exoplanets, a top science driver in the Astro2020 Decadal Survey. EarthShine can answer interconnected questions in Earth and lunar science, exoplanets, and astrobiology, related to the credo "follow the water." EarthShine could potentially take advantage of current and future NASA programs to conduct science from the Moon with low-cost, mature space hardware to reduce risk and assure success. Like the 1968 Apollo Earthrise image of our home planet, lonely in the black sky, the appeal of EarthShine images to a multidisciplinary array of researchers in Earth science, planetary science, and astrophysics will maximize both its scientific impact and its impact on the general public.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Patricia T. "Padi" Boyd has over twenty-five years of experience at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center leading a wide variety of teams and projects focused on space science missions, inclusive mentoring, and community engagement. Missions include the Hubble Space Telescope, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, the Kepler/K2 Space Telescope, and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). She has managed and led science teams, observing grants programs, software development efforts, and student and postdoctoral programs. Her research interests span the gamut from detecting planets around other stars, astrodynamics, and accretion onto compact objects of stellar mass, to supermassive black holes in active galaxies. She is the Chief of the Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory (NASA's GSFC, Code 667), and the host of NASA's "Curious Universe", a popular podcast highlighting NASA people, careers, and missions. She is currently on detail to NASA Headquarters in the Science Mission Directorate.

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