NASA HQ statement of goals of the
Exozody workshop:
"We plan to cover Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a spatial interferometer
working at infrared wavelengths to detect and characterize hypothetical
Earth-like planets in orbit around neighboring stars. It is expected that
a significant limitation to unambiguous planet detection and study will
be contaminating thermal emission from dust within the zodiacal plane
of the target systems. Unfortunately, the amount, distribution, and composition
of this exo-zodiacal dust is very poorly known, which may lead to uncertainties
in final design for TPF. Consequently, the goal of this workshop is to
present and discuss instruments, missions, and theoretical models which
might produce an improved understanding of exo-zodiacal dust."
Comment: note, this means we should cover what can be done toward investigation
of exo-zodiacal dust with missions already planned by NASA before moving
toward possible suggestions of what new missions, instruments, modeling,
etc. should be funded by NASA.
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