My colleagues at JPL continue to make progress on the Starshade, a component of a space telescope designed to image planets around other stars. Here’s a video of the central disk unfolding. Origami folk might recognize a wee bit of folding (or rather, unfolding) going on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=676cfK56T2U Last week at a conference, I chatted with John Mather of Goddard (he was project scientist for COBE, which made the first detailed measurements of the cosmic background radiation and earned him a trip to Stockholm), and he mentioned that his current idea is to put one of these in Earth orbit, which would be something like 3x larger. Robert
