new telescopes ( n wnh e nabling w ide-field)
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NEW Telescopes(NWNH Enabling Wide-
Field)Michael Strauss
(with thanks to David Spergel)
aka “National Reconnaissance Office” (NRO) Telescope
These telescopes are left-overs from an obselete DoD program of ~15 telescopes.
A team was assembled to put together a science case to use these telescopes in the WFIRST context. WFIRST: a wide-field NIR ~1.5m telescope
This solid angle could potentially double!
Open Questions• Faster and Better? YES; Cheaper? Probably not. But
the political momentum is there!
• Geosynchronous or L2?
• What can we do without modifying the telescope?
• Funding possibilities? Probably, better than before
• What does this mean for LSST? IR complement likely producing data on comparable time-scale. Fantastic news for photo-zs and weak lensing.
• Political question: who is responsible for reprocessing LSST + Euclid + NEW data?
Scientific potential for science other than weak lensing is completely unexplored. Could exposures be divided to give an interesting cadence for variability?
There are two such telescopes; what should the second telescope do (if funds available)? A coronagraph, perhaps? A UV imager? We can fantasize about transient follow-up; what would the ideal space-based instrument be?
A Conference about the NRO/NEW
TelescopesHow should the astronomical community best use these telescopes?
Princeton, September 4-6, 2012
http://www.princeton.edu/astro/news-events/public-events/new-telescope-meeting/
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