Related papers: Interferometry from Space: A Great Dream
Astronomers usually need the highest angular resolution possible, but the blurring effect of diffraction imposes a fundamental limit on the image quality from any single telescope. Interferometry allows light collected at widely-separated…
Recent advances in telescope design, photodetector efficiency, and high-speed electronic data recording and synchronization have created the observational capability to achieve unprecedented angular resolution for several thousand bright…
LISA is a proposed space-based laser interferometer detecting gravitational waves by measuring distances between free-floating test masses housed in three satellites in a triangular constellation with laser links in-between. Each satellite…
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is an airborne observatory consisting of a specially modified Boeing 747SP with a 2.7-m telescope, flying at altitudes as high as 13.7 km (45,000 ft). Designed to observe at…
Gaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in 2013 and set on L2 point of Lagrange. It will observe a large number of Solar System Objets (SSO) down to magnitude 20. The Solar System Science goal is to map thousand of Main Belt…
The University of Sydney has a long history in optical stellar interferometry. The first project, in the 1960s, was the Narrabri Stellar Intensity Interferometer, which measured the angular diameters of 32 hot stars and established the…
We report the progress in the realization of an electronic / optical simulator for space based, long arm interferometry and its application to the eLISA mission. The goal of this work is to generate realistic optics and electronics signals,…
The lunar surface is a compelling location for large, distributed optical facilities, with significant advantages over orbital facilities for high spatial resolution astrophysics. The serious development of mission concepts is timely…
Astrophysical measurements away from the 1 AU orbit of Earth can enable several astrophysical science cases that are challenging or impossible to perform from Earthbound platforms, including: building a detailed understanding of the…
Cosmology with large interferometric telescopes is a rich and largely unexplored subject, involving three types of measurement: astrometric measurement of absolute distances and proper motions, dispersions of relative proper motions, and…
Europe's Gaia spacecraft will soon embark on its five-year mission to measure the absolute parallaxes of the complete sample of 1,000 million objects down to 20 mag. It is expected that thousands of nearby brown dwarfs will have their…
Atom interferometry is an exciting tool to probe fundamental physics. It is considered especially apt to test the universality of free fall by using two different sorts of atoms. The increasing sensitivity required for this kind of…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is a future space-based interferometric gravitational-wave detector consisting of three spacecraft in a triangular configuration. The interferometric measurements of path length changes between…
We present a proposal for the construction and development of a new instrument for radio astronomical observations based on interferometric techniques, that will provide high angular resolution in the 21 cm band, with the intention of…
One of the atom interferometer gravitational wave missions proposed by Dimopoulos et al.1 in 2008 was called AGIS-Sat. 2. It had a suggested gravitational wave sensitivity set by the atom state detection shot noise level that started at 1…
We present a graphical interface designed to demonstrate the techniques of radio interferometry used by telescopes like ALMA, e-Merlin, the JVLA and SKA, in a manner accessible to the general public. Interferometry is an observational tech-…
The exquisite precision delivered by interferometric techniques is rapidly being applied to more and more branches of optical astronomy. One particularly successful strategy to obtain structures at the scale of the diffraction limit is…
Astrometry from space has unique advantages over ground-based observations: the all-sky coverage, relatively stable, and temperature and gravity invariant operating environment delivers precision, accuracy and sample volume several orders…
The detectors designed for Gaia, the next ESA space astrometry mission to be launched in 2011, will allow to observe repeatedly stars very close to Jupiter's limb. This will open a unique opportunity to test General Relativity by performing…
Sky survey telescopes and powerful targeted telescopes play complementary roles in astronomy. In order to investigate the nature and characteristics of the motions of very faint objects, a flexibly-pointed instrument capable of high…