The Science Case for an Extended Spitzer Mission
Abstract
Although the final observations of the Spitzer Warm Mission are currently scheduled for March 2019, it can continue operations through the end of the decade with no loss of photometric precision. As we will show, there is a strong science case for extending the current Warm Mission to December 2020. Spitzer has already made major impacts in the fields of exoplanets (including microlensing events), characterizing near Earth objects, enhancing our knowledge of nearby stars and brown dwarfs, understanding the properties and structure of our Milky Way galaxy, and deep wide-field extragalactic surveys to study galaxy birth and evolution. By extending Spitzer through 2020, it can continue to make ground-breaking discoveries in those fields, and provide crucial support to the NASA flagship missions JWST and WFIRST, as well as the upcoming TESS mission, and it will complement ground-based observations by LSST and the new large telescopes of the next decade. This scientific program addresses NASA's Science Mission Directive's objectives in astrophysics, which include discovering how the universe works, exploring how it began and evolved, and searching for life on planets around other stars.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.1710.04194,
title = {The Science Case for an Extended Spitzer Mission},
author = {Jennifer C. Yee and Giovanni G. Fazio and Robert Benjamin and J. Davy Kirkpatrick and Matt A. Malkan and David Trilling and Sean Carey and David R. Ciardi and Daniel Apai and M. L. N. Ashby and Sarah Ballard and Jacob L. Bean and Thomas Beatty and Zach Berta-Thompson and P. Capak and David Charbonneau and Steven Chesley and Nicolas B. Cowan and Ian Crossfield and Michael C. Cushing and Julien de Wit and Drake Deming and M. Dickinson and Jason Dittmann and Diana Dragomir and Courtney Dressing and Joshua Emery and Jacqueline K. Faherty and Jonathan Gagne and B. Scott Gaudi and Michael Gillon and Carl J. Grillmair and Alan Harris and Joseph Hora and James G. Ingalls and Tiffany Kataria and Laura Kreidberg and Jessica E. Krick and Patrick J. Lowrance and William A. Mahoney and Stanimir A. Metchev and Michael Mommert and Michael Migo Mueller and Yossi Shvartzvald and Howard Smith and Kevin B. Stevenson and H. I. Teplitz and S. P. Willner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.04194},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
75 pages. See page 3 for Table of Contents and page 4 for Executive Summary