March 16, 2001
The suite of Origins missions extends from the Hubble Space Telescope, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, to the Terrestrial Planet Finder which is expected to fly ten years from now. The speaker will describe the missions illustrated with examples of Origins related scientific results, ranging from galaxies detected in the early universe to recent discoveries of new worlds.
Dr. Anne L. Kinney a native of Wisconsin, studied at the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagan for several years before receiving her Ph.D in physics from New York University. She is an expert in extragalactic astronomy and has worked on characterizing the optical and UV spectra of quasars, blazers, active galaxies and normal galaxies. She has searched for signatures of accretion disks in active galaxies, and demonstrated that the disks lay at random angles relative to their host galaxies. Dr. Kinney was Instrument Scientist on one of the original instruments to fly with Hubble Space Telescope, the Faint Object Spectrograph. She worked in Education and Public Outreach with the Hubble Space Telescope and was involved in creating the program, Amazing Space http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/, an educational web site for children to learn basic principles of science, math, and astronomy. Currently, Dr. Kinney is the Director for the Astronomical Search for Origins and Planetary Systems in the Office of Space Science at NASA Headquarters where she oversees the ongoing progress on Hubble Space Telescope as well as the progress on upcoming missions such as SIRTF (Space InfraRed Telescope Facility), the fourth of the Great Observatories, SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomer), a 2.7 meter telescope which flies above the atmosphere in a 747, ST-3 (Space Technology 3), a technology demonstrator for formation flying and space interferometry, SIM (Space Interferometry Mission) and ultimately, TPF (Terrestrial Planet Finder), a mission searching for earth-like planets. Dr. Kinney has served on the Council of the American Astronomical Society, and has been a visiting scholar at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.