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ID the Future Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast
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Bijan Nemati on Another Big Space Telescope, and The Privileged Planet

Episode
1695
With
Eric H. Anderson
Guest
Bijan Nemati
Duration
00:29:26
Download
Audio File (18.1 mb)
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On this ID the Future, astrophysicist Bijan Nemati delves further into why intelligent design matters to him and into the exciting work he’s doing for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, slated for deployment in three or four years. That telescope and his contribution to it, as it so happens, tie directly into the popular science documentary he participated in, The Privileged Planet. Nemati describes how the instrument his company is building for the telescope is designed to aid in the search for earth-like planets beyond our solar system and why the list of criteria for planetary habitability is longer than many people suppose.

Bijan Nemati

Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama
Bijan Nemati is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He received his Ph.D. in high energy physics from the University of Washington, based on his research on heavy quark decays detected at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. After post-doctoral work at the Cornell synchrotron, he left particle physics to work on advanced astronomical instruments at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Nemati’s work on the NASA flagship Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) proved that the instrument could self-calibrate at the levels needed to detect exo-Earths. In 2020 Dr. Nemati authored a major paper on how to architect the system engineering of the exo-Earth imaging space telescopes.