Wfirst - The best of both worlds

NASA officially is beginning work on an astrophysics mission designed to help unlock the secrets of the universe -- the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). With a view 100 times bigger than that of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, WFIRST will aid researchers in their efforts to unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, and explore the evolution of the cosmos. It also will discover new worlds outside our solar system and advance the search for worlds that could be suitable for life. WFIRST is the agency's next major astrophysics observatory, following the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018. The observatory will survey large regions of the sky in near-infrared light to answer fundamental questions about the structure and evolution of the universe, and expand our knowledge of planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets. It will carry a Wide Field Instrument for surveys, and a Coronagraph Instrument designed to block the glare of individual stars and reveal the faint light of planets orbiting around them. By blocking the light of the host star, the Coronagraph Instrument will enable detailed measurements of the chemical makeup of planetary atmospheres. Comparing these data across many worlds will allow scientists to better understand the origin and physics of these atmospheres, and search for chemical signs of environments suitable for life. The telescope’s sensitivity and wide view will enable a large-scale search for exoplanets by monitoring the brightness of millions of stars in the crowded central region of our galaxy. The survey will net thousands of new exoplanets similar in size and distance from their star as those in our own solar system, complementing the work started by NASA's Kepler mission and the upcoming work of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Employing multiple techniques, astronomers also will use WFIRST to track how dark energy and dark matter have affected the evolution of our universe. Dark energy is a mysterious, negative pressure that has been speeding up the expansion of the universe. Dark matter is invisible material that makes up most of the matter in our universe. By measuring the distances of thousands of supernovae, astronomers can map in detail how cosmic expansion has increased with time. WFIRST also can precisely measure the shapes, positions and distances of millions of galaxies to track the distribution and growth of cosmic structures, including galaxy clusters and the dark matter accompanying them. WFIRST is slated to launch in the mid-2020s. The observatory will begin operations after traveling to a gravitational balance point known as Earth-Sun L2, which is located about one million miles from Earth in a direction directly opposite the sun. WFIRST is managed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, also in Pasadena, and a science team comprised of members from U.S. research institutions across the country. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Wiessinger This video is public domain and may be downloaded at: ******

(music) (music) (music) Telescopes generally come into two different flavors. You have really powerful big telescopes, but those telescopes see a tiny part of the sky or telescopes are smaller and so they lack that power but they can see big parts of the sky. WFIRST is the best of both worlds. WFIRST is the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. What I think of WFIRST is doing is building on what where the two great successes astronomically of the 1990's in the last decade, that is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble Space Telescope. WFIRST is a NASA observatory that has the top ranking of the National Academy of Sciences to launch in the twenty twenties. It has the same image precision and power as the Hubble Space Telescope but with one-hundred times the area of sky that is used. Looking at a large fraction of the sky allows you to get a more complete accounting. For example the stars in the Large Megellanic Cloud, which is the nearest galaxy to us or the stars in the galactic bulge; so you can do a much more complete accounting in a much shorter amount of time. The particular thing I'm interested in using WFIRST for, is to actually do a statistical census of planetary systems in our galaxy. And what we're looking for is gravitational microlensing events, these are cases when another start passes in front of our line of sight to a background star and it makes that background star get a little bit brighter due to the gravity of that foreground star, and that allows us to find planets. What WFIRST will do is it will have what we call a coronagraph. A coronagraph lets us image and characterize really dim planets, next to very bright stars. No matter how good a telescope that you build, its always going to have some residual errors. This is going to be the first time that we're going to fly an instrument that contains these high format deformable mirrors, that are going to let us correct for errors in a telescope, that's never been done in space before. WFIRST will allow us to potentially make groundbreaking discoveries in finding out what dark energy is. So this will tell us if dark energy is an unknown form of energy or if its a modification of general relativity. Single WFIRST images will contain over a million galaxies and we can't categorize and catalog those galaxies ourselves. Citizen science allows interested people in the general public to solve scientific problems and so one of the things that I'm really excited about is enabling this bridge where the general public can get involved in doing actual science. For me, its really an exciting opportunity to play a significant role in a mission that I think will be one of the most powerful telescopes that we have in the twenty twenties; and will be some of the most important things our country does in space in that time frame. (beeping) (beeping) (beeping)