Related papers: WFIRST Science with a Probe Class Mission
The past three decades have seen prodigious advances in astronomy and astrophysics. Beginning with the exploration of our solar system and continuing through the pioneering Explorers and Great Observatories of today, NASA missions have made…
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is by far the largest telescope of any kind ever built. FAST produced its first light in September 2016 and it is now under commissioning, with normal operation to commence in…
As part of NASA's mission to explore habitable planets orbiting nearby stars, this paper explores the detection and characterization capabilities of a 4-m space telescope plus 50-m starshade located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, a.k.a. the New…
MICROSCOPE is a French Space Agency mission that aims to test the Weak Equivalence Principle in space down to an accuracy of $10^{-15}$. This is two orders of magnitude better than the current constraints, which will allow us to test…
This is the report of the Ultraviolet-Optical Working Group (UVOWG) commissioned by NASA to study the scientific rationale for new missions in ultraviolet/optical space astronomy approximately ten years from now, when the Hubble Space…
FIRST is a prototype instrument built to demonstrate the capabilities of the pupil remapping technique, using single-mode fibers and working at visible wavelengths. We report on observations of the binary system Capella at three epochs over…
Satellite imaging is a critical technology for monitoring and responding to natural disasters such as flooding. Despite the capabilities of modern satellites, there is still much to be desired from the perspective of first response…
The World Space Observatory/Ultraviolet (WSO/UV) represents a new mission implementation model for large space missions for astrophysics. The process has been brought up to enable, fully scientific needs driven, a logic to be applied to the…
For the first time in history, humans have reached the point where it is possible to construct a revolutionary space-based observatory that has the capability to find dozens of Earth-like worlds, and possibly some with signs of life. This…
The next decade will see two large-scale space-based near-infrared surveys, Euclid and WFIRST. This paper shows that the subtle differences between the filters proposed for these surveys and those from ground-based photometric systems will…
The exhilerating results from Swift in its first year of operations have opened a new era of exploration of the high energy universe. The surge to higher redshifts of the Gamma-ray bursts now imaged with increased sensitivity establishes…
The Wide-field Infrared Transient Explorer (WINTER) is a 1x1 degree infrared survey telescope under development at MIT and Caltech, and slated for commissioning at Palomar Observatory in 2021. WINTER is a seeing-limited infrared time-domain…
The size of the optics used in observatories is often limited by fabrication, metrology, and handling technology, but having a large primary mirror provides significant benefits for scientific research. The evolution of rocket launch…
The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory, or HabEx, has been designed to be the Great Observatory of the 2030s. For the first time in human history, technologies have matured sufficiently to enable an affordable space-based telescope mission…
A budget neutral strategy is proposed for NSF to lead the implementation of multimessenger astronomy and astrophysics, as outlined in the Astro2010 Decadal Survey. The emerging capabilities for simultaneous measurements of physical and…
The Origins Space Telescope (OST) will transform our understanding of the Universe, from formation of the earliest galaxies to the creation of habitable worlds. OST's Mission Concept 1, the subject of this report, features a cold (4 K)…
Recent advances in optical atomic clocks and optical time transfer have enabled new possibilities in precision metrology for both tests of fundamental physics and timing applications. Here we describe a space mission concept that would…
IRAC excels at detecting distant objects. Due to a combination of the shapes of the spectral energy distributions of galaxies and the low background achieved from space, IRAC reaches greater depth in comparable exposure time at 3.6 and 4.5…
We present a framework for the analysis of direct detection planet finding missions using space telescopes. This framework generates simulations of complete missions, with varying populations of planets, to produce ensembles of mission…
India reached a major milestone in the area of space astronomy with the successful launch and post-launch operations of its first space observatory, AstroSat. The success of this space observatory and the lessons learned must be utilized…