Savransky named to team guiding NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory

Sibley School Associate Professor Dmitry Savransky has joined the START team assembled by NASA to guide the development of the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). According to NASA, the HWO is “a concept for a flagship mission…that would pursue a breadth of astrophysics goals, including searching for and characterizing potentially habitable planets beyond our solar system.”

The Science, Technology, Architecture Review Team (START) will help formulate the mission’s fundamental science goals. START members are tasked with engaging with the broader science, technology, and engineering communities to gather input that will inform the mission’s final goals as well as explore how to best pursue these goals.

Savransky, who received a NASA Early Career Faculty Award in 2019, is a natural fit for the START. His research program at Cornell has included varied topics that share a common focus on detecting and characterizing extrasolar planets. The topics have included investigations of advanced control and estimation for active wavefront control systems; computer vision and machine learning applications for automated optical system alignment and astronomical image post-processing; optimal scheduling for autonomous space observatories and ground-based surveys; and statistical analysis of large astronomical surveys.

The START has 28 members from academia, industry, and government research entities. Their end goal is to quantify the Habitable Worlds Observatory’s science objectives and delineate the observatory and instrument capabilities required to accomplish them. In addition to this assignment, team members are expected to establish a mentorship program and provide mentorship to early-career individuals.

"I am incredibly honored and pleased to have been named to the START,” Savransky said. “In many ways, HWO is something that I, and countless others, have been working towards for a long time, and it is very exciting to be taking this next step in advancing this mission.  I am also looking forward to working alongside my fellow START members, as well as the much broader community of talented scientists and engineers that will make this mission possible."

The team will meet for the first time at the end of October in Washington, D.C.