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astronomers now know that virtually

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every star in the night sky has at least

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one planet orbiting around it and they

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believe that many of these planet could

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Harbor life here's the problem the

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planets are orbiting extremely bright

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star sometimes billions of times

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brighter than the reflection off the

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planet but if you can block just the

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light from the star all of a sudden you

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can study the planet in more detail

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let's go figure out how to block a

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star's light on this episode of crazy

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all right we're here with Nik Sigler in

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this very fun looking lab Nik you tell

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us a little bit about where we are Mike

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we're in JPL's starshade lab what

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exactly is a starshade used for Mike

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there are two techniques that NASA is

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advancing to look for life on exoplanets

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the star shade basically is a large

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shade that is flown outside of a

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telescope with the intention of blocking

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the light of the star so then we can see

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the planets like skirt the shade and

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captured by the telescope okay so this

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is much like I'm looking up at the Sun

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and I want to see a bird or an airplane

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I put my hand up to block the sun's

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light but we have to do it on a much

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larger scale for a star the star shade

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itself is tens of meters in diameter

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that's the size of a baseball diamond

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just about how far away from the

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telescope would it happen why it's tens

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of thousands of miles you can fit like

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four earths between the telescope and

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the shade it's got its own propulsion

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system

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it's literally its own spacecraft how do

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we get it up into space that's the

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engineering challenge is how do we get

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something that has to deploy to tens of

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meters of diameter that gets it on top

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of a rock so now our engineers have come

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up with a technique based on the ancient

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practices of origami sounds difficult

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how do you know that's gonna work well

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we do what we always do we start small

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and we work our way up so we started in

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this case with something just a few

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inches in size then we built something

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meter in diameter and we mature it up to

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2 meters and now we finally got up to 5

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meters the one that flies in space is

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gonna be tens of meters okay so you're

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using origami to make this really large

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star shape it's a fun mechanical

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engineering project but you mentioned

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that NASA is actually investing in two

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different technologies

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what's the second technology that one is

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called a coronagraph

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the coronagraph can we take a look at

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that one let's go okay Nick this is

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obviously a lot different than the last

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lab we were in we're in bunny suits now

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are trying to be super clean can you

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tell us where we are right now Mike we

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are in JPL's high contrast imaging

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testbed lab this is where we test the

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next-generation space coronagraphs

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behind us is one of our vacuum chambers

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where we simulate the environment of

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space what's the big difference than

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approaches here with the starshade we

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saw that the blocker was way outside of

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the telescope

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now as another approach we're going to

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take that huge blocker and shrink it

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down to the size of something that could

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fit in between your fingers this way you

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can fit on the back end of a telescope

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this particular mask is the size of a

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pinhead all of that star light has to be

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focused right on to that little pinhead

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we want to make sure that the focused

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light from the star hits the sweet spot

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of the mask so it's critical that we

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have a mechanism to control the focus

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light all right we saw the star shade

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and now the coronagraph they're both

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crazy in their own ways and a lot of

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really great engineering so what's the

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endgame what do we hope to accomplish

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Mike we're trying to develop the

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technology to be able to look for life

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on other planets the hard part is

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blocking the light from the star once we

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do that we have other technologies that

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are much more mature and we'll be in a

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better position to look for evidence of

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life Nick thank you so much for showing

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us both of these approaches in both your

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laboratories we really got a sense of

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the contrast between the different

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approaches hope you guys out there had a

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lot of fun learning about it and check

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back soon for some more crazy

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