Martin Harwit

Professor Emeritus of Astronomy
Ph.D. 1960 (MIT)

Campus Address:
511 H Street, SW
Washington, DC

Phone: 202-479-6877

Research Projects: Sub-Millimeter Wavelength Astronomy Satellite Project., Become Mission Scientist on the European Space Agency’s Far-infrared Submillimeter Telescope (FIRST), Far-Infrared and Submillimeter Interferometer

Biography: I live and work in Washington, DC, and maintain contact with Cornell through my research grants and contracts, which are administered by the university. At the moment, I am engaged in several lines of research.

I serve as a member of the science team of the Submillimeter Wave Astronomical Satellite, SWAS; I am a mission scientist on the European Space Agency's Far Infrared / Submillimeter Telescope, Herschel; I am principal investigator on a study that deals with the potential construction of a kilometer-baseline far-infrared/sub millimeter wave interferometer in space; and I am a member of a team that is submitting a proposal to NASA to build an optical coronagraph to detect and conduct spectroscopy on Jupiter-sized planets in orbit about nearby stars.

Another current interest centers on whether astronomical sources could be generating electromagnetic radiation with orbital angular momentum, and how this type of radiation might be most readily detected. And for a long time I have been fascinated by trying to understand what makes for advances in astronomy.

Selected Publications: "The Growth of Astrophysical Understanding," Martin Harwit, Physics Today, November 2003,
38-43.

"Photon Orbital Angular Momentum in Astrophysics," Martin Harwit, ApJ 597, 1270, 2003.

"Observations of Water Vapor Outflow from NML Cygnus," Viktor Zubko, Di Li, Tanya Lim, Helmut Feuchtgruber and Martin Harwit, Accepted Astrophysical Journal (2004)

"Extra-Solar Planetary Imager (ESPI) for Space Based Jovian Planetary Detection" Richard G. Lyon, Dan Y. Gezari, Gary J. Melnick, Peter Nisenson, Costa Papaliolios, Steve Ridgway, Edward Friedman, Martin Harwit and Paul Graf, in "High-Contrast Imaging for Exo-Planet Detection," A. B. Schultz and R. G. Lyon editors, Proceedings of the SPIE Volume 4860, 45, 2003.

"The Herschel Mission" Martin Harwit, Proceedings of the COSPAR 2002 meetings in Houston Texas, Paul Wesselius editor, to be published in Advances in Space Research, 2004.