Terrestrial Planet Finder: the search for life elsewhere

Author

Noecker, Charley ; Kilston, Steven

Author_Institution

Ball Aerosp. & Technol. Corp., Boulder, CO, USA

Volume

4

fYear

1999

fDate

1999

Firstpage

49

Abstract

The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission is a proposed interferometer instrument for direct detection of the light from planets around nearby stars. Targets will be Earth-like planets up to a million times fainter than their host stars, yet only 0.1 arcseconds away. Nulling interferometry (subtraction of the optical electric fields collected by several telescopes) suppresses the stellar glare to allow direct detection and coarse spectroscopic study of the thermal-IR light from a distant planet. We present an overview of studies led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), outlining the challenges and the potential payoffs of this mission

Keywords

astronomical telescopes; extrasolar planets; infrared astronomy; light interferometers; Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Terrestrial Planet Finder; coarse spectroscopic study; interferometer instrument; nulling interferometry; optical electric fields; thermal-IR light; Biomedical optical imaging; Earth; Instruments; Laboratories; Optical interferometry; Optical sensors; Planets; Propulsion; Spectroscopy; Telescopes;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Aerospace Conference, 1999. Proceedings. 1999 IEEE

Conference_Location

Snowmass at Aspen, CO

Print_ISBN

0-7803-5425-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/AERO.1999.792078

Filename

792078