NASA's search for habitable planets and life beyond the solar system

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SETI Institute

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Title: You Had Me at Habitable - NASA's search for habitable planets and life beyond the solar system
Speaker: Gary H. Blackwood, Manager, NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program, JPL
Thanks to the recent discovery of thousands of exoplanets we now know that our galaxy is abundant with small planets, increasing our confidence that we may soon find nearby habitable worlds.  Come hear about recent exoplanet discoveries and NASA's plans to search for habitable planets and life beyond the solar system.  Dr. Blackwood will discuss recent results from the Kepler/K2 and Spitzer missions and preview the exoplanet science of the upcoming WFIRST mission.  Additionally, NASA is a funding a new state-of-the-art radial velocity instrument and is nearing the completion of the first survey of exo-zodiacal dust critical to the design of future missions.   Recent progress in coronagraph and starshade technology are making feasible the next generation of space telescopes to perform the interstellar search for life on habitable exoplanets.

Dr. Gary H. Blackwood earned his BS, MS and PHD in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from MIT.  He has been an employee at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA since 1988 and has worked on technology development for precision astronomical instruments and astrophysics missions including the Hubble Wide/Field Planetary Camera-2, the StarLight formation-flying interferometer, the Space Interferometry Mission and the Terrestrial Planet Finder.  Since 2012 he has served as the Program Manager for the NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program, managed by JPL for the Astrophysics Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate.