Dr. Charles Beichman is the Executive Director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, NASA’s Center for exo-planet research. In addition to overseeing the development of the science operations center for Space Interferometer Mission (SIM; now on hold) at the NExScI, he leads a SIM Key Project to find planets orbiting young stars. Dr. Beichman has been deeply involved in the search for evidence of planetary systems using first IRAS and now Spitzer. Most recently he and his collaborators have published numerous papers on Kuiper Belt and asteroid analogs surrounding nearby solar type stars based on Spitzer results. One spectacular system, HD 69830, shows emission due to sub-micron sized particles some 1,400 times brighter than our own zodiacal cloud and which appears to be closely associated with a triple planetary system discovered via RV measurements. With Mark Swain and collaborators, he adapted analysis tools used to identify weak debris disks with the Spitzer spectrometer to extract the spectrum of the planet HD209458b during a secondary transit.
For the past 10 years Dr. Beichman has been closely associated with and helped to formulate NASA’s program to search for planets around other stars, serving as Chair of the Science Working Group for the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and authoring numerous articles and reports on TPF and the search for terrestrial and ultimately habitable planets.