Hundreds of planets outside of our solar system have been discovered by observing their gravitational interaction with their host stars. Now NASA is developing a new space observatory that will allow us to directly image some of these planets (http://wfirst.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/exoplanets/exo_imaging.html). The goal of this project is to use data on known exoplanets to simulate their possible orbits and evaluate the ability of the proposed mission to image them. This project is well suited for a student with a strong background in dynamics and good coding ability. Knowledge of Python or MATLAB is preferred but not required.
Contact: Prof. Savransky - ds264@cornell.edu