ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIUM (Neugebauer Lecture)

At the time that Gerry Neugebauer's IRAS satellite was launched, I was a graduate student at Berkeley just starting in research. I had an opportunity to help with an observing run at the NASA IRTF on Mauna Kea, and one of our prime targets was IRC +10216, discovered in Gerry's and Bob Leighton's 2 micron sky survey (Becklin et al. 1969). Since then, much of my career has been spent chasing Gerry's discoveries and developing better technologies to do that. I will trace that path and describe how the development of superconducting kinetic inductance detectors over the past twenty-five years could enable the NASA probe-class mission PRIMA, which would give us a very deep look at the far-infrared universe unveiled by IRAS.