Making Telescopes to Look for Life in the Universe by Dr. Jeff Kuhn

Making Telescopes to Look for Life in the Universe by Dr. Jeff Kuhn, UH Institute for Astronomy.
Recorded 03/20/2015 at the Advanced Technology Research Center in Pukalani, Maui, Hawaii.

What kind of instrument does it take to study other planets? Exoplanet searches command a large fraction of the collective attention of the world astronomical community—but we have yet to build a telescope that is optimized to study distant planets. Most of the world's largest telescopes now being designed or built have general astronomical goals that aren't well matched to the problem of detecting life in the universe or studying the conditions on far-away exoplanets. I'll describe a project centered on Haleakalā called PLANETS—"Polarized Light from the Atmospheres of Nearby ExtraTerrestrial Systems." PLANETS will take a step forward toward studying these exoplanets and proving some of the new technologies we'll need to find life, or even other civilizations around other stars, in our corner of the universe.

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