George Helou plenary: Today’s Visions, Tomorrow’s Telescopes

Great advances in concept and technology have taken us from Galileo's telescope to NASA's Great Observatories, revolutionizing astronomy and cosmology many times along the way. Today's scientists and engineers are dreaming up yet more innovations to enhance our ability to collect and analyze photons and other physical messengers.

In this plenary session, George Helou of Caltech gives a visionary look into telescopes of the future and how they will provide a view "into the invisible," to answer questions about how the Universe came to be in its current state and how it is held together. Helou outlines some visionary space telescope projects, their challenges, their reach, and their promise to help us rethink the Universe.

George Helou is Executive Director of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) and Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, CA. Helou has worked on the science operations of IRAS, ISO, Spitzer, Herschel, Planck, and WISE. He has used those and many other telescopes to study how galaxies turn gas and dust into stars, and how the first generation of stars and quasars came about and evolved into today's universe.