Carl Sagan’s Spirit of Exploration Lives On

The Sagan Fellowship program, named after the late Carl Sagan, supports talented young scientists in their mission to explore the unknown. Following the path laid out by Sagan, these bright fellows will continue to tread the path, make their own discoveries and inspire future Sagan fellows. Image credit: NASA/Cosmos Studies

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” This is a quote from famed astronomer, cosmologist and author Carl Sagan, and is also the spirit of the NASA fellowship named in his honor. For 2011 the space agency has announced the names of the five recipients of the Carl Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowship.

In the spirit of scientific discovery, the fellowship created in 2008 is awarded to enable researchers to answer questions about our place in the universe and the potential for life elsewhere within it. Researchers are awarded annual stipends of approximately $64,500 for up to three years, plus an annual research budget of up to $16,000.

“The Sagan Fellowship program seeks to identify the most highly qualified young researchers in the field of exoplanets. Nowhere is the dynamism of this young branch of astronomy demonstrated more dramatically than by the intellectual quality and enthusiasm of these five new Sagan Fellows,” said Charles Beichman, executive director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “These scientists are certain to be leaders of this exciting and rapidly growing field for many years to come.”

The recipients of this year’s Carl Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowship award are::

— David Kipping, who will work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, to combine theory and observation to conduct a search for the moons of exoplanets.

— Bryce Croll, who will work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., to characterize the atmospheres of both large and small exoplanets using a variety of telescopes.

— Wladimir Lyra, who will work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., to study planet-forming disks and exoplanet formation.

— Katie Morzinski, who will work at the University of Arizona, Tucson, to commission and employ high-contrast adaptive optics systems that will directly image Jupiter-like exoplanets.

— Sloane Wiktorowicz, who will work at the University of California, Santa Cruz to use a technique called optical polarimetry to directly detect exoplanets.

Source: NASA