Post-lunch session:

[I’m indenting Latham-specific stuff to separate it from the science content here.  Dave has clearly made this a prospective conference, but many participants cannot resist anecdotes and comments about his prolific career.]

First up is Lars Burchave talking about deriving metallicities of the Kepler stars.   Two ingredients needed to extend known relations to lower-mass planets:  huge sample, and metallicities for the stars in it.  Kepler gives us the first; lots of work into getting the second.  Simple cross-correlation of synthetic library spectra to high resolution spectra of KIC stars yields good effective temperatures and metallicities; does not require high SNR.   Yields a homogeneous sample of parameters for 152 host stars.

Average metallicity correlates with detected planet radius with high statistical significance; below 2 Earth radius average metallicity is sub-solar.

Finishes with images from Google searches on “David Latham,” including those of a band called “David Latham and the Strangers,” and as an actor in “Jesus Christ Superstar”.  

More seriously, he showed images of Dave on a bike at Loveland Pass (way up at the Continental Divide) and other places, and closes with “congratulations on being one of the pioneers in the exoplanets field, so all of the rest of us can do such great work.”

Now we move on to TESS, from the PI himself, George Ricker.  Chair Josh Winn points out that George was “converted” by David Latham from an X-ray astronomer to “one of us.”  George starts with 7 years of “TESS-related proposal covers”: HETE-2 (High Energy Transient Explorer-2) turning into “Hot Exoplanet Transit Experiment-Survey by using the star tracker.  In 2008, TESS was proposed from scratch as a SMEX2 and finally a full explorer TESS to launch in 2017.  Will discover the “best” 1,000 small exoplanets.  Whole sky survey from magnitudes 4-12; 500,000 stars.  TESS will find planets around brighter stars than Kepler, although the planets will be bigger on average.   

Shows prototype TESS cameras and a full-scale mockup, and a movie illustrating the 4 camera FOV, (23 degrees square, each), which have 27 day-long stares.  The movie is very slick, and features a nifty lunar gravity assist into a transfer orbit, followed by a burn to go into a 2:1 orbital resonance with the moon, an orbit that is stable over decades (the orbit exploits the Kozai mechanism!).  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpViVEO-ymc

Josh assures the audience that the repetitive movie music will eventually get out of our heads with time (it is called “Night City” George tells us, comes free with Apple movie software).

George and Dave apparently competed over getting better deals for things when traveling;  George found the cheapest rental cars, but Dave consistently found the cheapest hotel rooms.  In this, “Dave’s tolerance for bedbugs beat mine.”

In the Q&A, we learn that TESS will point with reaction wheels (like Kepler) but George assures us that it will have 4 of them, and there is a mission that had one last for 6 whole years (the audience is both very amused and very concerned).  

Finally, Josh Winn introduces David Latham to talk about TESS.  

Josh tells us that 7 years ago he started as an exoplanet researcher, and Dave invited him into his office to discuss being part of the the Kepler followup mission.  Josh was surprised because at this point he had only 3 exoplanet papers, one of which nobody cites (“I don’t even cite it,” he says) and another that was wrong (“but does get cited!” Geoff interjects, to much amusement).  Josh concludes: “I am not the only one in this room that has benefitted from Dave’s generosity” and his “childlike enthusiasm” when he has every right to be an old grump.

At this point, Dave approaches the podium to a lengthy standing ovation.  He says that people do occasionally call him “crusty.”

Dave says it’s in retrospect a good thing that the SMEX version of TESS did not get selected, because lessons learned from Kepler have shown how hard it would have been to have a low duty cycle and low Earth orbit.  Once Kepler launched Dave “got distracted by other things,” but eventually got back to TESS.  His admonishment “sleep is for sissies” to the TESS gang made it into the glossary.   

Lessons from Kepler that informs TESS: 

• Small planets are common, so TESS will find hundreds of planets. 
• Multiples are common (and coplanar), so gravitational interactions would be important and measurable.  This also makes continuous coverage very important.  
• Photodynamical analysis is powerful and multitransiting systems are “information rich”
• Followup with HARPS-N will be essential.  
• The pipeline is challenging and critical.  Dave quotes Andrew Howard from earlier, calling the Kepler pipeline one of the great achievements in scientific computing; agrees that “that’s not far off.”

Dave’s talk is gracious and full of praise for his collaborators, especially Jon Jenkins’ team.

Josh asks for questions for “the discoverer of Latham’s planet.”