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Telescopes generally come into two different flavors. You have really powerful big

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telescopes, but those telescopes see a tiny part of the sky or

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telescopes are smaller and so they lack that power but they can see big

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parts of the sky. WFIRST is the best of both worlds. WFIRST

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is the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. What I think of WFIRST is doing

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is building on what where the two great successes astronomically

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of the 1990's in the last decade, that is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

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and the Hubble Space Telescope. WFIRST is a NASA observatory

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that has the top ranking of the National Academy of Sciences

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to launch in the twenty twenties. It has the same image precision

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and power as the Hubble Space Telescope but with one-hundred

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times the area of sky that is used. Looking at a large fraction of the sky

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allows you to get a more complete accounting. For example the stars in the Large Megellanic

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Cloud, which is the nearest galaxy to us or the stars in the galactic bulge;

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so you can do a much more complete accounting in a much shorter amount of time.

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The particular thing I'm interested in using WFIRST for,

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is to actually do a statistical census of planetary systems in

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our galaxy. And what we're looking for is gravitational microlensing events, these are

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cases when another start passes in front of our line of sight to a background star

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and it makes that background star get a little bit brighter due to the gravity of that

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foreground star, and that allows us to find planets. What WFIRST

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will do is it will have what we call a coronagraph. A coronagraph lets us

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image and characterize really dim planets,

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next to very bright stars. No matter how good a telescope

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that you build, its always going to have some residual errors. This is going to be the

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first time that we're going to fly an instrument that contains these high format deformable

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mirrors, that are going to let us correct for errors in a telescope, that's never

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been done in space before. WFIRST will allow us

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to potentially make groundbreaking discoveries in finding

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out what dark energy is. So this will tell us

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if dark energy is an unknown form of energy or if its a modification

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of general relativity. Single WFIRST images will contain

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over a million galaxies and we can't categorize

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and catalog those galaxies ourselves. Citizen science allows

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interested people in the general public to solve scientific problems

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and so one of the things that I'm really excited about is enabling this bridge

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where the general public can get involved in doing actual

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science. For me, its really an exciting opportunity to play

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a significant role in a mission that I think will be

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one of the most powerful telescopes that we have in the twenty twenties;

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and will be some of the most important things our country does in space in that

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time frame.

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(beeping)

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(beeping)

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(beeping)

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