Congratulations to Jacob Shapiro for successfully completing his B exam. A copy of his talk, titled “Using Modern Mathematical and Computational Tools for Image Processing”, is available here, or watch his presentation below.
MAE Seminar
I had the privilege of giving the MAE department seminar on October 20th, titled “Engineering the Search for New Worlds.” A recording of the talk is available below, and the slides can be accessed here.
Fun with Git
I’ve been exploring use of some slightly more advanced git functionality to help with project organization, and have sketched out some notes for cool things you can do with git submodules, and my personal associated use cases:
Gabe’s Masterpiece
As a going away present, I would like to bequeath my magnum opus.
Congratulations Dr. Soto!
Congratulations to Gabriel Soto for successfully completing his B exam. A copy of his talk, titled “Orbital Design Tools and Scheduling Techniques for Optimizing Space Science and Exoplanet-Finding Missions”, is available here, or watch his presentation below.
Astronomical Journal Paper Published
Congratulations to Carlos Gascón (visiting student from Polytechnic University of Catalonia in 2019) on the publication of his paper: “Analytic Stability Maps of Unknown Exoplanet Companions for Imaging Prioritization” in the Astronomical Journal. This paper explores the idea of looking for unknown planets that could be directly imaged, orbiting stars where one (un-imageable) planet has already been discovered. Data for the paper is also available from Cornell eCommons.
EXOSIMS – WFIRST Publication by Dean Keithly now in JATIS
Dean Keithly and the hard working maintainers of EXOSIMS finally have a new publication validating the number of exoplanets detectable via direct imaging by the WFIRST coronagraph. The paper includes planet population, observation time optimization, and scheduling of these observations.
The full citation is:
Dean R. Keithly, Dmitry Savransky, Daniel Garrett, Christian Delacroix, Gabriel Soto, “Optimal scheduling of exoplanet direct imaging single-visit observations of a blind search surveylt;/p,” J. Astron. Telesc. Instrum. Syst. 6(2), 027001 (2020), doi: 10.1117/1.JATIS.6.2.027001.
The paper is available under open access at http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.6.2.027001.
AAS 235th Meeting
SIOSLab was well represented last month at the 235th AAS Meeting in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Corey Spohn presented his poster on “Dynamically Scheduling Direct Imaging Missions” and Dean Keithly Presented his talk on “Exoplanet classification probabilities from initial detections in a direct imaging mission.” Two members also presented dissertation talks: Jacob Shapiro presented his talk on “Identifying Exoplanets with CSP Filtering and a Forward Model Matched Filter” and Gabriel Soto presented his talk on “Fuel Cost Heuristics for Starshade Retargeting Slew Maneuvers.”
GPI 2.0 Is a Go!
We are very happy to announce that we have secured funding from the NSF and HSF for an upgrade of the Gemini Planet Imager. Once commissioned at Gemini North in Hawaii in 2022, GPI 2.0 will be even more sensitive than the original GPI, and capable of imaging planets around even more distant and fainter stars. For more information, see our Research page, as well as this article in the Cornell Chronicle.
Photon Sources Diagram
This is a diagram from Dean Keithly’s admission to candidacy exam slide deck outlining the major light sources included in EXOSIMS and our model of WFIRST.