My project in the news

I've been meaning to write a post about Project Minerva, a joint venture between Caltech, Penn State (Prof. Jason Wright) and the University of Montana (Prof. Nate McCrady). Fortunately, the JPL press office took care of the writeup for me:

http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/news/53

A snippet:

Compared to many other telescopes, especially ones powerful enough to spot the exceedingly faint signatures of Earth-size exoplanets, Minerva is designed to be deployed quickly and relatively inexpensively. The system will eventually consist of four 0.7-meter, off-the shelf telescopes set up in an array on Palomar Mountain in southern California. Each telescope will be able to observe targets either on its own or in sync with the others, giving the system a large amount of flexibility. Using the small telescopes together will give Minerva the power of a much larger telescope and make it one of the only ground-based instruments capable of finding rocky exoplanets like Earth.

The first telescope will be constructed next month! Stay tuned for more updates.

Comments

mama mia said…

a highly effective habit, being proactive...just collaborate and build it yourselves...love it!

September 8, 2012 at 5:38 PM

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