How Nancy Grace Roman's Coronagraph Will Revolutionise Planet Hunting

[@lilyp4369]

omg i love how excited she is, the genuine passion for her work is mesmerizing

[@nicolasolton]

Who?

[@DavidvanDeijk]

such a pleasant guest to listen to. I hope you have Dr Vanessa Bailey on the show more often.

[@the-chow-hall]

This was fantastic, I would love to see Dr. Bailey back in the future!

[@blogsfred3187]

Great interview, highly articulate and clear communicator.

[@jamesmoore4023]

The advancements in AI, space exploration, and neuroscience are way too exciting. No dull days.

[@ugiswrong]

Personally I feel the planetary wars we experience here under gravity are much more compelling than all this photography

[@oberonpanopticon]

@@GreatWhiteClipsSpace is only moderately less deadly for machines

[@JohnSostrom]

I enjoy your programs. Unlike news videos, yours are more in a teaching mode. I appreciate that very much. Thank you.

[@adamh1228]

great interview! I'm a mechanical engineer, and while I only do production engineering stuff in a factory that works in 1/16" for the most part, I love astronomy and all this cutting edge tech. Maybe in another life I will build machines that require fourier maths to do their job.

[@Fiercefighter2]

When I was in road construction I worked with someone who used to run a machine that makes bearings for military helicopters. He was really proud of working with tight tolerances. I think he said the machine had to stay calibrated to within 1/128th of an inch or maybe it was 1/256th. Either way I found it fascinating!

[@adamh1228]

@@Fiercefighter2 i think you misunderstood his references, ball bearing manufacturing, particularly for the aerospace industry is just incredibly precise work. I would not be surprised if he actually was talking about 1/10000000" precision, perhaps even tighter. ball bearings are no joke.

[@donrane]

Vanessa seems very comfortable on screen. Hope to see more off her.

[@danialgowans1693]

I thought that as well.

[@ChristianCelinder]

OMG Thaaanks to you both. I’m floored. Fraser you are the best. Thanks for inviting all these beautiful minds. Dr. Bailey is soooooo inspiring. Best, Chris Copenhagen

[@frasercain]

Thanks a lot, I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[@FinneyDale]

Great episode as usual. I understand you’re looking for questions. Maybe you had this one already but here goes. Do astronomers know of any exoplanets with highly elliptical orbits?

[@josephbray2870]

Great talk. Super informative. I actually have the honor to work on the assembly of RST currently.

[@frasercain]

Oh wow, good luck with the integration.

[@bimblinghill]

This one was particularly good I thought. Dr Bailey pushed things to a really satisfying technical level!

[@JenniferA886]

Loved this interview… I had to see it twice 👍👍👍

[@johndoepker7126]

Mirror Maker : "You wamnt me to polish it to a pico-what...!?" Dr. Vanessa : "ugh, nevermind, we'll bend the crap out of it til we get wat we want..." 😂 This is so cool! I got May '27 totally locked in for launch.

[@busybillyb33]

Picometre scale is insane precision. I think you can bend it that much just by breathing on the mirror!

[@Poske_Ygo]

DR. Bailey might have been your best guest yet.

[@maneatingduck]

Great video! The coronagraph sections were especially amazing, with clear and pedagogic explanations of advanced concepts from Dr. Bailey initiated or followed up by very insightful questions from Frasier. I would love to see more of this kind of micro deep-dives in future interviews. Also, I suspect that many among the audience are insterested in technical in-depth language and explanations. Please bring on the Fourier transforms, QM, intricate instrument tech details and other interesting concepts :)

[@danialgowans1693]

Love ur channel dude !!

[@busybillyb33]

4:30 I don't think I understood the answer to the question. Could you explain again how the Roman telescope is able to get a wide field of view with the same mirror size and light gathering power as Hubble? Is it doing several Hubble sized pictures quickly across a patch of sky to give the wide field of view? And are each of these comparable in resolution and light gathering power to Hubble? Or is the light spread out over a larger area?

[@MFT_RAW]

She don't know mate. Optics are not her thing. You can't expect a carpenter to understand how trees grow...

[@oceanscene22]

I smashed my screen liking your video Jack. It was worth it. Always enjoy your videos. Good info, open to woo and fun Texas style.

[@noelstarchild]

Great article Mr Cain. I get great pleasure from being so thoroughly informed. We are making tiny steps but they're adding up to something tangible. Good job sir.

[@peterjones958]

You have done it again Fraser, what a fantastic interview. A lot of what Dr Bailey is talking about is stuff I have never heard of before, however with your explanations and the help of Google I am learning something new every day. Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

[@tambourine_man]

Hey Fraser, you said you needed questions, I asked this one a while ago, I’ll try again :) Would it be possible to combine two gravitational lenses, for example, the sun and a distant black hole, to capture an ancient image of the Earth? If so, how further back in time can we go and still have enough resolution to distinguish continents and atmosphere composition? Please assume we would find a black hole at the best possible theoretical distance and alignment. Thanks! Love your channel.

[@eeshwargrewal]

I have always wondered the same thing.

[@rheffner3]

Another great interview Fraser. Thanks. Can't wait for it's launch and operation.

[@DavidHauck-zy6gm]

Thank you Fraser-great interview you are appreciated

[@mrbaab5932]

If the mask is made with laser scan lithography and not binary lithography you can get grade shade lithography since the laser power can be varied in time as it scans. The best computer generated null interferograms have been made this way for decades.

[@I-0-0-I]

This was truly excellent. Great guest, great questions. Fraser is the Rick Beato of spaaaace.

[@deep_space_dave]

I really enjoyed this podcast. Thank You!

[@johnmheaton]

Really enjoyed this interview, thank you.

[@mrsmiastef]

Thank you for this video! Fantastic interview! Great information!

[@coulie27]

Great interview! Great guest 😊

[@dannybell926]

I like this interview. Thank you to both Vanessa and Fraser.

[@cavetroll666]

very cool interview.

[@woody5109]

Topic idea might be reviewing all the major telescopes up there, F ratios, focal lengths, sensors, band widths, costs, could be good.

[@limabravo6065]

I was a freshman in high school in 1997. During the first week of school I was in the library and 2 magazines had space based articles. 1 was an article about the pillars of creation amd the other being europa and its possible ocean. The thing that got me was the article on the pillars detailed that because of its size, you have to be many light years away like we are to see it in full (forest through the trees idea) and then they went on to describe just how big they are or were. The article also went on to explain the star formations Going on and how they thought that took place. Then of course the europa article broke down its having an ocean and being the best spot in our system to find life outside of earth. And as I was hooked

[@DhanYellMhickz]

Question: for ground based telescopes, would a starshade on a stick under a highly stable quadcopter far up and away work?

[@vanessabailey6102]

For high performance, starshades actually need to fly thousands of kilometers in front of the telescope! I believe some astronomers have proposed an earth orbiting star shade, but there’s quite a bit of work to go before they’ll be able to tell whether it’s feasible.

[@triskeliand]

Fraser, the same way your brain can eliminate one of those floaty things on your cornea from your overall perception is my understanding of what coronographs do in a sense. Eye floaters are spots in your vision. They may look to you like black or gray specks, strings, or cobwebs. They may drift about when you move your eyes. Floaters appear to dart away when you try to look at them directly. @22:54 n.b. DNA has absorption spectrum at 595nm from memory @45:07, that's why you need a dynamic system rather than n(actuators). You need infinite(actuators) Birefringence and DNA Condensation of Liquid Crystalline Chromosomes Eukaryot Cell. 2010 Oct; 9(10): 1577-1587.

[@LarsRyeJeppesen]

What a wonderful woman.

[@DavidHauck-zy6gm]

WOW-WOW-I HOPE ALL THOSE PARTS WORK IN SPACE-I HOPE I HOPE

[@flying_shawn]

Question show question... We regularly hear about black holes emitting X-rays, particularly after they've munched on something, but this has always perplexed me: if the X-rays are being emitted by the singularity itself, wouldn't the gravity well prevent them from ever escaping the event horizon? Wouldn't they just turn around and fall back into the singularity? Or are the X-rays created as matter crosses the event horizon itself, meaning they can escape because they were never actually past the point of no return? Related... does the distance of the event horizon from the singularity for each wavelength vary because different frequencies of light/electromagnetism have different levels of energy? ie, the x-ray event horizon would be very slightly closer to the singularity than the radio one? Thanks!

[@petevenuti7355]

It's usually emitted by the accretion disk, and the amount of matter that can be squeezed into the area this limited so a black hole of a certain size can only eat so much so fast and the rest gets kicked out. There is also a region around a rotating black hole called an ergosphere where the energy of rotation and frame-dragging of space allows things to escape from just inside the event horizon!

[@McBanditHope]

Hello Frasier, got a question for you. On the topic of space exploration, there seems to be an equal amount of optimism to the amount of doomerism. A point I see a lot of pessimists bring up is foreign bacteria and viruses from other planets, saying that since the human body has never has an opportunity to adapt to these things, you'd pretty much instantly develop some sort of horrible disease the second you stepped onto a planets surface. How much of this is hysteria and how much is genuinely well founded concern? I'd assume since we have a rather small sample of life in outer space; 1, from the 1 planet we all inhabit, that the knowledge on exoplanetery microorganisms is largely speculative. Isn't it just as likely bacteria from another planet is largely harmless because it hasn't evolved and adapted to recognize humans as something to attack? Kinda like how there are many animal illnesses that just don't effect people?

[@MFT_RAW]

300 million to a billion starlight suppression. That's all you have to say and I'm yours🥰 Best space content on KZbin!❤

[@witwisniewski2280]

I wonder if it is not possible to use more than one mask, that is successive masks at different locations in the optical path to get more degrees of freedom in tailoring the spatial response. I am thinking use diffraction as an optical operator to generate novel PSFs instead of just battling and mitigating undesirable diffraction. Thanks for not insulting your viewers' intelligence by explaining what actually is necessary to achieve planet images.

[@PSwayBeats]

Please someone put a radio telescope in to space 🙏 it's the only thing we're missing up there

[@tambourine_man]

Another question: since light is a quantum phenomenon and its intensity falls with the square of the distance, there must be a fundamental limit to how far we can see a light source, even ignoring the universe expansion, dust, diffraction limits, etc, right? For example, how far can we detect a lumen in ideal conditions? Thanks.

[@mrbaab5932]

Note that the shorter focal length of Roman versus Hubble for the same detector pitch will have a larger angular resolution. So Roman will have worst resolution, but probably many more pixels than Hubble, since the array will probably be much larger.

[@markfrancis5164]

USA’s success and future ambition for astronomical science is a wonderful gift for the world to enjoy.

[@Ava31415]

Excellent thank you

[@dancingwiththedogsdj]

That was a great discussion, but I do somewhat disagree only when it's mentioned that it's silly to expect a single generation of equipment going from 1 million to 10 billion as far as sensitivity shouldn't be thought of that way, with the A.I. we are developing and everything, why not think it's possible.... We are surprised basically every day it seems now in space or technology of all kinds..... It might not be that big of an improvement immediately, but who hasn't seen the crazy ways we find to improve things and get more out of it than you could have ever even considered happening with something next generation, nah, someone smart figured this and that out and got it to do things we thought simply were not possible. We should have proper expectations on one hand, but they seem to also limit or stifle things occasionally even if we overcome it or whatever rather quickly. Anyways, thank you for all of your time and doing what you do! 🍻🌎❤️🎶🕺🏻🤯

[@CapitalWheeler]

What orbit do the want for Roman? Do we notice when an exoplanet blocks a more distant object? Okay, here's my question for the week: Are Starships wings big enough to safely land on Mars? Could Starship launch from Earth with larger wings? Is there some critical formula?

[@vanessabailey6102]

Roman will be in an L2 orbit (beyond the moon). Since we need it to be very stable, we don’t want it to go in and out of Earth’s shadow many times a day like Hubble does in its low earth orbit.

[@vanessabailey6102]

The Roman Wide Field instrument will detect hundreds if exoplanets via “microlensing” - when an exoplanet passes almost in front of a distant star, it can cause the distant star to appear temporarily *brighter*

[@FuhKinglet]

question: what are your thoughts on the big crunch theory? is it possible in the far future the universe can contract in, then reach a critical point and cause a big bang again, creating an infinite cycle of expansion and contraction?

[@seionne85]

An hour discussion about a single piece of hardware on a yet to be launched space telescope?!? I think I've found my corner of the Internet ❤

[@frasercain]

Hah, but it could be the key to discovering life on other worlds, so it's a pretty interesting piece of hardware. :-)

[@seionne85]

@@frasercain I'm so excited about the progress that's being made! And I couldn't think of a better piece to spend the time on, don't mistake that for a complaint haha!

[@mshepard2264]

Question I have noticed that many Imagers that go to space are CCDs. CCDs are very rare in consumer or professional cameras these days as CMOS imagers now have very high quantum efficiencies and are easier to read out faster. I was wondering why CCD imagers are selected for space telescopes so often? Thanks

[@vanessabailey6102]

We use an electron-multiplying CCD in Roman Coronagraph, because it could be optimized to enable us to detect very faint visible light signals (1 photon per pixel every 10 seconds !). In infrared applications that aren’t trying to go quite as faint, CMOS are often used. In fact, the Roman Wide Field Instrument uses CMOS. The future Habitable Worlds Observatory will need exquisitely sensitive detectors, and whether it will use CCD or CMOS, or something altogether new is TBD

[@ElitePhotobox]

You can make a reflector that has it reflector mirror set to the side outside of the visible area of the main mirror !.

[@phdnk]

Why not the entire field of view is covered with image sensors ? It discards a big portion of the image. What limits the observatory's throughput ?

[@vanessabailey6102]

In wide field imaging, light on one side of the image takes a slightly different path through the telescope than light on the other side of the image. At the level of precision that we care about for coronagraphy, the small differences matter. In Roman Coronagraph, we can only precision-correct one very narrow region, so we only look at one star system at a time.

[@phdnk]

@@vanessabailey6102 thank you, I almost understood the reason, for there are also non-coronographic applications that might have benefited from the wider field of view. E.g. microlensing detection. I feel there is a second half of the explanation: some portion of the would-be wider field of view is sacrificed for colonography instruments which presumably obstruct some portion of the wide field image, and therefore the image field gets it crescent shape. As for future colonography, I expect that HWO (former HabEx) might get redesigned to 8m monolithic off-axis solution. Because by that time Starship will fly and GMT will be built, so 1/6 of GMT in space becomes appealing and practical.

[@vanessabailey6102]

Absolutely - the other instrument on Roman is the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and it is optimized for wide field rather than coronagraphy. I don’t work on WFI, but you can find more information about it here roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/WFI_technical.html

[@Ava31415]

Question for your question show: Apparently there is another incoming extra solar system object detected, only a few years after the first one...how often is this likely to happen?

[@frasercain]

We only know of 2 so far, but it's estimated there are thousands in the Solar System.

[@rJaune]

This was a wonderful interview! So much great information. But, I have a question. Can the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope be upgraded with software while in orbit?

[@vanessabailey6102]

Yes, we will be able to send up patches to correct issues and make small improvements. We’ll have much more flexibility to improve our data processing software over time, because that’s all done on the ground after the fact.

[@rJaune]

@@vanessabailey6102 Oh, wow! Thanks, Dr. Bailey!

[@sergey9986]

It is not that important, but it still came to my mind, while I'm fighting insomnia. This "greying-out" of the aperture edges is apodisation that is used in many photographic lenses to get nicer bokeh. The "2D sinc function" has in fact very little to do with the sinc function as the diffraction pattern is described by Euler functions instead.

[@ChemEDan]

Would NGR be able to see planets with extensive ring systems? It would be pretty cool to see the axial tilt intersect the ecliptic and change throughout its year. Perhaps catch exomoon eclipses in a similar way to planet transits? (you'd know exactly when to steal telescope time if you had the tilt figured out).

[@vanessabailey6102]

Yes, we’d measure the total light reflected by the planet plus any rings it has. The rings would probably need to be very large for us to notice. The tricky part would be convincing ourselves that the weird behavior we’re seeing is due to rings and not just an imperfect model of the planet or its clouds. Unfortunately I don’t think these planets will be bright enough for us to search for moon transits. For the cold Jupiter-like planets, we need to collect light for a day or more just to barely detect them

[@davemi00]

Incredible Science Building and sending these complicated instruments into orbit in space.

[@spencerholmes7602]

Great stuff! Thanks Fraser. With adaptive optics, however, if we know exactly where and how much to deform the mirror to correct the image, why don’t we just correct the image electronically and dispense with pistons and deformable mirrors?

[@asadaboobaker7465]

The detectors used in these instruments don't retain phase information about the incoming waveform, so there is no way to correct the image after it has been acquired -- information about the light is lost in the process of detection. By using adaptive optics, you manipulate the phase of the light wave directly *before* it gets detected. This is true both of coronagraphs as well as the adaptive optics systems used on ground-based telescopes.

[@vanessabailey6102]

Yes, that’s right - and I’ll add a couple more thoughts. The first is that our model isn’t perfect. We spend about a day iteratively tuning up the deformable mirrors (move, image, move, image…) to get to even 10 million to 1. The other is that there’s a fundamental limit to how well you can know the instantaneous brightness of the starlight in a given pixel, and if we didn’t block the star first, that uncertainty would be much too high to recover the planet. (Google Poisson statistics for photons if you want a deep dive)

[@spencerholmes7602]

@@asadaboobaker7465 thank you. Eye opening stuff.

[@spencerholmes7602]

@@vanessabailey6102 mind blown. Thank you 😊

[@HughPryor]

Are coded masks used in the coronagraph?

[@vanessabailey6102]

I’m afraid I’m not familiar with coded masks. The kinds used on the Roman Coronagraph Instrument are the Hybrid Lyot Coronagraph and the Shaped Pupil Coronagraph.

[@herbertboelk7545]

@ Dr Bailey: Considering masks have to be adapted in a case by case scenario, could the black silikon masks be printed on site with a kind of space 3D printer and then be transfered by a kind of mecanism to the scope?

[@kylej7593]

they’re so precise, they’re probably made with light lithography, the same way we make microchips(not certain, am not expert). so probably can’t 3d print them in space yet. maybe one day.

[@seancaceres619]

I just asked the question, "why should we spend the money hunting planets and not the propulsion unit to get us to these (habitable planets) that will exceed our grasp with current technology?" So why would we, unless we already have the technology?

[@hive_indicator318]

Don't you think it makes more sense to make sure there is a habitable planet before figuring out how to get there?

[@ArmchairMagpie]

@@hive_indicator318 People went to explore the world before they got their domains in order, long before we had an understanding of what the cosmos is. The notion of waiting until X before we do Y is based on three weak premises: Humans will eventually stop being humans. We can establish a form of control that keeps other humans in complete and total check. Humankind as a global society can't multitask.

[@hive_indicator318]

@@ArmchairMagpie but they knew where the planet was and that they would be able to breathe there. They didn't set off on century long journeys on the off chance they'd find a rocky planet with breathable air. Also, I didn't make this an either/or question. Take that up with OP.

[@ArmchairMagpie]

@@hive_indicator318 Yes, of course that makes more sense. The answer was supposed to be directed at the OP, and I know I went a bit off the tangent here with raising the sociological question here as well - not meant to strawman here. But it is directly connected, since we didn't wait until we had combustion and steam engines until we started exploring the world, either.

[@samchilds8600]

Hi. I got this question from my 8 year old son which I struggled to answer. Hope you can help. We were reading about China digging a 10 000 meter hole to the cretaceous system when my son asks me "if it were possible to build a tunnel right through the earth and out the other side and placed a ladder inside, would it feel like you were climbing down the ladder until you got to the middle and then up the ladder after that? "

[@frasercain]

He's exactly right. And the gravity would feel less and less as you went down. Weightless in the middle.

[@canobenitez]

@@frasercain how interesting, what's the ubication with the largest gravity pull for an object on the earth then? I thought it was in it's core.

[@doncarlodivargas5497]

You are obviously interested in telescopes Fraser, so, why is it we can't build/make holographic telescopes? Send it up to space, a foil stretched out on a frame, costing a couple of dollars, weighing a couple of kilos and being perhaps hundreds of meters in diameter?

[@petevenuti7355]

How do you make that superblack silicon fur?

[@vanessabailey6102]

It’s not my specialty, but here’s a brief summary that might be interesting microdevices.jpl.nasa.gov/capabilities/advanced-microfabrication-technologies/black-silicon/

[@goyya888]

Thanks!

[@DavidHauck-zy6gm]

what about 1.8 times size of earth??

[@ElitePhotobox]

What are the Dynamic range of the sensors ?

[@vanessabailey6102]

We use the same model CCD in our science camera and our internal guide camera, just with different readout settings (exposure time and gain). Our science camera observes the planet while the guide camera observes its host star. These objects are a factor of about 100million, although we play some optical tricks to spread out the bright starlight out over more pixels in the guide camera, so it’s less than 100 million on a per pixel basis.

[@sja45uk]

Vanessa was ill prepared to answer the general questions at the start of the interview. @frasercain should consider supplying the interviewee with an initial list of questions he intends to ask well before the meeting.

[@oberonpanopticon]

I just read that it could potentially discover around a THOUSAND 300+ meter sized moons of Jupiter!

[@Reyajh]

Fantastic stuff... I've got a good feeling we're going to get an abundance of bang for our buck on this one!!! Y'all got me rethinking my stance on The Habitable Worlds Observatory as well, go figure... Not that it matters... That being said, since we have limited resources and it's... that ONE pixel..., smh. ¯\(°_o)/¯

[@j7ndominica051]

I can watch a beautiful woman talk about aperture and sinc transform all day.

[@JenniferA886]

👍👍👍

[@meesalikeu]

revolutionize 😅

[@daverobert7927]

Dr. Vanessa you are tooooo cute to be an Astronomer

[@lunamireles7897]

Random question. Would someone who has implants ( ie : breast or ext. ) be able to travel in space? Moon? Mars?

[@frasercain]

Sure, they're filled with liquid that isn't going to expand under pressure changes.

[@fep_ptcp883]

Google: "did you mean Nancy Graziano?"

[@andriesv8903]

wow

[@michaelanthony5509]

Does this mean we will no longer require a nasal swab?

[@lucasfleming2716]

Just found your content about 3 weeks ago and now I just insta click on your thumbnails

[@davemi00]

To see a Taco Bell sign on a planet millions of light years away, will give me hope. 🌮

[@williamb9389]

IMO James Webb has been VERY disappointing. Not sure why this huge investment has been made into this system.

[@frasercain]

What were you hoping to learn?

[@chrisgriffith1573]

Frasier: "What changes in the optics were there to give you that wide field of view?" Answer: "Not my field..." Then goes on to talk about unrelated things about astronomy...

[@greatzardoz8547]

Space Telescopes was a WOMAN'S idea 😂

[@woody5109]

She was doing the dishes in the coffee room when she looked through a glass to see how clean it was, then it came to her 😂😂

[@poneill65]

Oh Humanity!,.. There's a Dr. Vanessa Baily,.. and then there's a Donald J. Trump,.. ...and they both have equal rights to oxygen. Go Figure!

[@mickeymelnick2230]

Fraser, what's your IQ?

[@Rattus-Norvegicus]

Moist

[@alanmodia]

Well said!