Physics Colloquium: “NAIL - a tiny little part to do a very big job” with Timothy Cook 9/18

09/13/2024
By Amanda Vozzo

Physics Colloquia, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, 4 p.m. in Ball Hall 214

Speaker: Timothy Cook, Associate Professor, Department of Physics and Applied Physics, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Title: “NAIL - a tiny little part to do a very big job.”

Abstract: We are in the midst of a scientific and worldview revolution. 35 years ago the only planets we knew about where in the solar system. We though we understood those nine pretty well. Everything else was science fiction. 35 years later we have now indirectly detected over 7000 planets and directly detected - imaged - over 1000. And those planets are very different from the ones found in the solar system. To learn more about those planets and to find planets more and more like the planets in the solar system we need better and more precise telescopes. That's where we come in.

We have built and tried out telescopes for imaging planets and asteroid belts around nearby stars. We call the experiments PICTURE and we are now up to PICTURE D. Having built these telescopes and instruments we've started to learn what works, and where we need to do better. And one thing we've learned is that there is a very tiny part, of a very big machine, called a deformable mirror controller, that just isn't good enough. We have to make it better.

This will be the story of how. I'll talk about the NAIL that controls the deformable mirror that fixes the camera, that goes on the telescope, that sees the planet that can hold life that can make every story about extraterrestrial civilization possible. The moral of the story is details are important.

Bio: Tim Cook is an associate professor in the department of physics at UMass Lowell and a Principal Investigator at the Lowell Center for Space Science and Technology. He has a bachelors degree in physics from the Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Colorado. He specializes in building space flight instrumentation to study everything from the Earth's atmosphere to nearby stars to galaxies beyond the Milky Way. He has flown over 20 different experiments on sounding rockets, high altitude balloons, small satellites, and the international space station.