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Tale of Two telescopes: Exoplanets. Hubble Space Telescope-- WFIRST. 

I'm Aki Roberge and I'm an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. 

Hi I'm Nikole Lewis I'm an assistant professor at Cornell University and I'm 

an exoplanetary scientist. Aki: The very first project that I ever did when I 

started graduate school was used data from the Hubble Space Telescope and I 

checked my records and that was 1997. So I am definitely what you would call 

"Hubble hugger," one of the astronomers who had NASA's Great Observatories like 

Hubble around pretty much for their entire careers. Nikole: So I've been working with 

the Hubble Space Telescope for almost a decade now actually using it to study 

exoplanet atmospheres. Aki: I think I first started working on WFIRST about, let's see it 

was about four, four- five years ago now and so I'm involved with one of the 

teams that is --the science teams for the coronagraph instrument. Nikole: So I've been 

working on WFIRST now for a little over four years. I started back in about 

2015 we're getting into the fifth year now when they started the science 

investigation teams. Aki: It's really important to understand that Hubble 

wasn't designed to study exoplanets at all we didn't even know about them that 

they existed when Hubble was designed and launched, so the fact that we can 

study exoplanets with Hubble is pretty awesome. Nikole: With Hubble we're really looking 

at these planets that are on short-period orbits that are sometimes 

called transiting exoplanets and often we're looking at light that's passing 

through these planets atmospheres as they pass in front of their host star. 

Aki: WFIRST, on the other hand, is an exoplanet discovery machine, it's the machine you'd 

use like like Kepler was, to like just find out that “hey there's a planet 

around that star.” Nikole: Now, with WFIRST, it's really going to leverage different 

methodologies to look at exoplanets and it's gonna look at planets that are much 

farther away from their host stars. It has two different methods which one is 

microlensing that will help us to complete the census 

of exoplanets in our galaxy, and the other will be enabled through the

coronagraphic instrument which will actually take images of planets that are, you know, 

a little bit farther away from their stars compared with the ones that we use 

Hubble to study. Aki: What I've learned from working on Hubble is that, first of all, 

it's sort of expect the unexpected, and you can use a tool that was built for 

one thing if it's you know a general purpose tool like NASA's Great 

Observatories were, you can use it for other things. Nikole: Hubble was never designed 

to look at exoplanets and so we always have to use it in a very creative way to 

do the science we want to do. WFIRST of course is getting designed to study 

exoplanets from the get-go but I think we're still going to have to find 

creative ways to use WFIRST to better understand exoplanets. 

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