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D. P. Bennett (Notre Dame), C. Alcock (Penn), I. Bond (Auckland), E. Cheng (Goddard), J. Connor (Alaska), K. Cook (LLNL), P. Garnavich (Notre Dame), K. Griest (UCSD), D. Jewitt, N. Kaiser (Hawaii), T. Lauer (NOAO), J. Lunine (Arizona), G. Luppino (Hawaii), D. Minniti (Catolica), S. Peale (UCSB), S.H. Rhie (Notre Dame), J. Rhodes (Goddard), J. Schneider (Paris Obs.), R. Stevenson (Notre Dame), C. Stubbs (Washington), D. Tenerlli (Lockheed), N. Woolf (Arizona), P. Yock (Auckland)
The Galactic Exoplanet Survey Telescope (GEST) is a comprehensive extra-solar planet search mission which will employ the gravitational microlensing technique to detect planets with masses as low as that of Mars at all separations > 0.5AU. GEST is, therefore, the only proposed mission that will be sensitive to analogs of all the Solar System's planets except for Mercury and Pluto. GEST will measure the planetary mass function and separation distribution of the detected extra-solar planets, and it will test theories of planet formation by measuring the abundance of free-floating planets which may have become unbound from their host stars during the planetary system formation process. The GEST observations, when combined with ground based IR imaging using an adaptive optics system, will be able to identify the stars which host the planets for the lens stars of spectral type F, G, and K as well as some of the nearby M stars.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://bustard.phys.nd.edu/GEST/. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.