Rochester Institute of Technology | 22 July 2010
RIT professor develops technology for NASA
The hunt is on for Earth-like planets outside of our solar system. Since the 1990s, astronomers have detected more than 450 extrasolar planets—mostly large Jupiter-sized bodies—around nearby stars. Advances in technology are fueling the quest to find smaller, rocky planets resembling Earth and, possibly, evidence of life.
Rochester Institute of Technology scientist Don Figer is developing detector technology funded by NASA’s Technology Development for Exoplanet Missions Program and designed to directly image and characterize exoplanets. The two-year project will result in a detector array that can withstand the radiation in space, count individual photons or light pulses—thereby eliminating noise that could obscure the faint signal—and characterize exoplanets in one-third the time it takes using existing methods.
“If you can detect something much more quickly you can search many more systems,” says Figer, director of the Rochester Imaging Detector Laboratory and professor in the College of Science at RIT. “A three-year mission becomes a one-year mission, or you can detect three times as many objects in the same fixed time. That’s usually what astronomers like to do.”
To accomplish this “super” detector, Figer and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory are adapting technology they are currently developing for ground-based applications, such as the Thirty Meter Telescope. That project, funded by the Moore Foundation, supports the development of optical and infrared megapixel zero-read-noise detectors. Both initiatives build on detector technology originally invented at Lincoln Laboratory.