Scientific Colloquium
February 19, 2010


"Following Back Roads on the NASA Exoplanet Roadmap"

Just fourteen years ago, under the prodding of administrator Dan Goldin
to do something really grand, NASA drew up a "Roadmap for the
Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems." It was widely predicted
that discovering other systems would be extremely difficult and very
ambitious space-borne instruments were envisioned to do so. The roadmap
had a series of goals for these missions stretching to 2010 and beyond.
Virtually none of the hardware envisioned by the roadmap has been built,
yet we are right on track with regard to the intermediate goals. I will
describe how we managed to hold schedule and will predict some of the
further advances to be made by the James Webb Space Telescope when it is
launched in 2014.

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