Status of the Planet Formation Imager (PFI) concept

Michael J. Ireland, John D. Monnier, Stefan Kraus, Andrea Isella, Stefano Minardi, Romain Petrov, Theo ten Brummelaar, John Young, Gautum Vasisht, David Mozurkewich, Stephen Rinehart, Ernest A. Michael, Gerard van Belle, Julien Woillez
(Submitted on 1 Aug 2016)

The Planet Formation Imager (PFI) project aims to image the period of planet assembly directly, resolving structures as small as a giant planet’s Hill sphere. These images will be required in order to determine the key mechanisms for planet formation at the time when processes of grain growth, protoplanet assembly, magnetic fields, disk/planet dynamical interactions and complex radiative transfer all interact – making some planetary systems habitable and others inhospitable. We will present the overall vision for the PFI concept, focusing on the key technologies and requirements that are needed to achieve the science goals. Based on these key requirements, we will define a cost envelope range for the design and highlight where the largest uncertainties lie at this conceptual stage.

Comments: 14 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of SPIE 2016
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:1608.00582 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1608.00582v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Stefan Kraus
[v1] Mon, 1 Aug 2016 20:00:05 GMT (2159kb,D)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00582