Dartmouth Events

Abstract: The study of exoplanets, planets around other stars, has exploded since the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star in 1995.  Telescopes in space and on the ground have discovered thousands of weird and wonderful worlds and we have learned that exoplanets are both numerous and varied.  One of the long-standing goals of the exoplanet community has been to find planets like our own Earth – small rocky planets orbiting in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars.  Detecting these Earth twins has proven difficult since many years of extremely sensitive observations are required for a conclusive detection.

In this talk, I will describe a small space telescope, ASTERIA, which was designed to address the difficulty of detecting Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-like stars.  ASTERIA is a 6U CubeSat developed by MIT and NASA JPL to demonstrate high precision photometry in a small package.  I will tell ASTERIA’s ‘life story’ from design and development through launch, operations, and science results.  ASTERIA launched in August 2017, deployed from the ISS in November 2017, operated until December 2019, and de-orbited in April 2020.  During that time, ASTERIA observed numerous bright stars and a few solar system objects to address a range of science, tech demo, and outreach objectives.  I will finish by describing current work on an ASTERIA follow-on mission that will address the goal of finding an Earth twin orbiting a Sun-like star.