Future missions and instrumentation

Overview

A mission’s scientific reach depends on decisions made years before launch and on the work that keeps it running afterward. I split my time between operating missions that are flying now and shaping the ones still being built, always with the same question in mind: how do we design and run these observatories so they answer the questions we care about?

Roles and contributions

• Member of the NuSTAR Science Operations Center, supporting one of the workhorse hard X-ray telescopes in orbit.
• Science Operations Coordinator for UVEX, a NASA ultraviolet mission now in development, where I help plan how the mission will collect and deliver its data.
• Lead of the active-galaxy coronae group for HEX-P, a proposed high-energy X-ray probe, forecasting what it could measure.
• Contributor to calibration and observing strategies for the Athena X-IFU and to the science working groups of NewAthena.

Key results

• I developed a method to recover accurate spectra from the Athena X-IFU when it observes sources too bright to look at normally, by deliberately defocusing the telescope, which will extend the instrument’s reach to the brightest objects in the sky.
• I led the forecast of what a future high-energy X-ray probe could reveal about the coronae of active galaxies, quantifying the gains over current facilities.
• I am now working on how the next generation of X-ray missions could use eclipses to map regions around black holes that we cannot resolve any other way.
• I am also preparing the high-resolution spectroscopy these missions will deliver, which will trace the connection between the inner disk and the broad-line region in far greater detail than we can reach today.