Related papers: Discovery & Depth
In December 2010, NASA created a Science Definition Team (SDT) for WFIRST, the Wide Field Infra-Red Survey Telescope, recommended by the Astro 2010 Decadal Survey as the highest priority for a large space mission. The SDT was chartered to…
The US professional astronomy and astrophysics fields are not representative of the diversity of people in the nation. For example, 2017 AIP reports show that in 2014, women made up only about 20 percent of the faculty in astronomy and…
This paper presents an overview of the U.S. federal civil space budget between FY23 and proposed spending in FY25, providing a foundational reference dataset for civil space budget analyses. Projects that support, enable, or leverage space…
While both society and astronomy have evolved greatly over the past fifty years, the academic institutions and incentives that shape our field have remained largely stagnant. As a result, the astronomical community is faced with several…
How should we invest our available resources to best sustain astronomy's track record of discovery, established over the past few decades? Two strong hints come from (1) our history of astronomical discoveries and (2) literature citation…
The National Academy of Science Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee, in its new Decadal survey entitled Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium, recommends, as a first priority, the establishment of a National Virtual…
Cosmology is one of the four science pillars of LSST, which promises to be transformative for our understanding of dark energy and dark matter. The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) has been tasked with deriving constraints on…
Far-infrared astronomy has advanced rapidly since its inception in the late 1950's, driven by a maturing technology base and an expanding community of researchers. This advancement has shown that observations at far-infrared wavelengths are…
Public agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) award tens of billions of dollars in annual science funding. How can this money be distributed as efficiently as possible to best…
The Origins Space Telescope, one of four large Mission Concept studies sponsored by NASA for review in the 2020 US Astrophysics Decadal Survey, will open unprecedented discovery space in the infrared, unveiling our cosmic origins. We…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be a discovery machine for the astronomy and physics communities, revealing astrophysical phenomena from the Solar System to the outer reaches of the observable Universe. While many…
We report the outcomes of a survey that explores the current practices, needs and expectations of the astrophysics community, concerning four research aspects: open science practices, data access and management, data visualization, and data…
Fundamental coding and software development skills are increasingly necessary for success in nearly every aspect of astronomical and astrophysical research as large surveys and high resolution simulations become the norm. However,…
Over its more than thirty-year history, the Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation (ATI) program has provided grants to support technology development for ground-based astronomy. Research from this program has advanced adaptive optics,…
Much of the progress in Astronomy has been driven by instrumental developments, from the first telescopes to fiber fed spectrographs. In this review we describe the field of astrophotonics, a combination of photonics and astronomical…
We recommend a conceptual design study for a spectroscopic facility in the southern hemisphere comprising a large diameter telescope, fiber system, and spectrographs collectively optimized for massively-multiplexed spectroscopy. As a…
The past two decades have seen a tremendous investment in observational facilities that promise to reveal new and unprecedented discoveries about the universe. In comparison, the investment in theoretical work is completely dwarfed, even…
We advocate for a mission concept study for a space telescope dedicated to solar system science in Earth orbit. Such a study was recommended by the Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science (CAPS) report "Getting Ready for the Next…
The Astro2010 Decadal Survey recommended a Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) as its top priority for a new large space mission. The report of the WFIRST-AFTA Science Definition Team (SDT) presents a Design Reference Mission for…
I review the status of science with wide field surveys. For many decades surveys have been the backbone of astronomy, and the main engine of discovery, as we have mapped the sky at every possible wavelength. Surveys are an efficient use of…