The discovery of habitable and, possibly living, planets outside our solar system is an adventure that should and can be shared by all humankind. The Intensity Correlation Array ( ICA ) project brings this ideal close to reality by employing a technology that is inexpensive and that depends upon the collaboration of many small observatories to achieve the fineness of resolution of one gigantic telescope. Starting from two observatories located in southeastern Texas , the ICA will become a widely distributed network of observatories spread over hundreds of kilometers. The observatory of each group or institution can be used in two ways: individually, to serve the group's educational and scientific purposes; and collectively, as part of the large, widely distributed array of telescopes. Participants would both own their individual facility and take turns controlling the whole array. By this means, we intend to engage the broadest possible portion of the public as active participants in the exploration mission. Data acquired from all of the telescopes in the array are combined to form ultra-fine resolution images by computations based on the Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HB-T) effect. This is an essentially quantum phenomenon in optics that provides an inexpensive way to combine separate telescopes. Field units composing the array could be operated from college and university campuses as well as primary and secondary schools across the United States . Field units require only a telescope, photodectector, and data acquisition and communication equipment. The underlying technology of ICA avoids the expense of new detector technology or the expense and complexity of amplitude interferometry. Presently, the Central Operations Center located with the ICA Director accomplishes the subject assignments and final image processing. Besides engaging broad public participation in the planetary exploration mission by means of the Intensity Correlation Array (ICA), the ICA will eventually encompass two additional themes. A second theme encompasses teacher training for K-12 education and public education on exo-planet exploration missions by NASA, ESA and other agencies and organizations. We aim to directly inform all interested persons on exo-planet discoveries and technologies, utilizing data from existing projects as well as the ever increasing data from the ICA itself. Planned activities include public symposia, short courses, and K-12 teacher training. So far, we have described how the ICA would serve as a platform for educating and actively engaging the public in the exo-planet exploration mission. A necessary complement to these features, and the third theme of the ICA project is the establishment of a clearing house for all existing knowledge of discovered exo-planets. We plan to document the achievements of ICA as well as NASA, ESA, etc. programs by establishing a web-based Virtual Observatory for Exo-Planets serving the scientific community as an engine of discovery and by producing an Atlas of the Worlds. The latter is a readable textbook to serve the public with encyclopedic descriptions of each discovered planet, including the history of discovery, known characteristics, etc. This will be written in an accessible narrative style with needed explanatory data.
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