Natalie Batalha: A Planet for Goldilocks

"Not too hot, not too cold" reads the prescription for a world that's just right for life as we know it. Finding evidence of life beyond Earth is one of the primary goals of science agencies in the United States and abroad. The goal looms closer as a result of discoveries made by NASA's Kepler Mission. Launched in March 2009, Kepler is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems orbiting other stars in the galaxy. Finding inhabited environments is a path of exploration that stretches decades into the future. It begins by determining if Goldilocks planets abound. In this talk, Dr. Batalha will describe the latest discoveries of NASA's Kepler Mission and the possibilities for finding inhabited environments in the not-so-distant future. Dr. Natalie Batalha is an astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center and the Mission Scientist for NASA's Kepler Mission. She holds a Bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California Berkeley, and a Doctoral degree in astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Batalha has been involved with the Kepler Mission since the proposal stage and has contributed to many different aspects of the science, from studying the stars themselves to detecting and understanding the planets they harbor. She led the analysis that yielded the discovery in 2011 of Kepler-10b — the mission's first confirmation of a rocky planet outside our solar system. Today, she leads the effort to understand planet populations in the galaxy based on Kepler discoveries.