Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Abstract:  Finding planets similar to our own has long fascinated scientists and non-scientists alike.  TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) is an ongoing explorer class program aimed at this objective.  TESS is sponsored by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and slated for launch in late 2017.  MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Kavli Institute have teamed to develop a wide field-of-view camera system that will perform a full-sky survey of bright stars with the goal of identifying exoplanets for further study.  Earth-like planets are of particular interest.  This talk will discuss the basic science behind TESS, describe some of the design challenges involved in the instrument development, summarize performance test results from an engineering unit camera and conclude with a status of the flight instrument build.

Biography:  Kris Clark has worked at Lincoln Laboratory for eleven years and is currently the Deputy Instrument Program Manager for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission. For the past 20 plus years, Kris has been involved in the design, assembly, test, and verification of ground, airborne, and space-based electro-optical systems  with operational ranges from the UV to IR. Prior to her involvement with TESS, she worked on several NASA programs including  Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), Ozone Mapping Profiler Suite (OMPS), and Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM).

Kris holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in physics from Tufts University.