Related papers: The Origins Space Telescope
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 concept of putting a neutrino detector in close orbit of the sun has been unexplored until very recently. The primary scientific return is to vastly enhance our understanding of the solar interior, which is a major NASA goal.…
The Wide-Field InfraRed Space Telescope (WFIRST) will be capable of delivering precise astrometry for faint sources over the enormous field of view of its main camera, the Wide-Field Imager (WFI). This unprecedented combination will be…
Large X-ray observatories such as Chandra and XMM-Newton have been delivering scientific breakthroughs in research fields as diverse as our Solar System, the astrophysics of stars, stellar explosions and compact objects, accreting…
Over the last three decades, an exceptionally good science case has been made for pursuing gravitational wave (GW) astronomy. This has engendered a worldwide effort to detect the extremely weak signals generated by expected sources. With…
Long range observations in the field of astronomy have opened up our understanding of the Solar System, the Galaxy and the wider Universe. In this paper we discuss the idea of direct in-situ reconnaissance of nearby stellar systems, using…
Assess the joint capabilities of emerging telescopes for near-Earth objects (NEOs) survey and characterization, and what they will add to the current capabilities or replace. NASA telescopes in prime mission, in development, or under study,…
The Advanced Telescope for High-energy Astrophysics (Athena+) is being proposed to ESA as the L2 mission (for a launch in 2028) and is specifically designed to answer two of the most pressing questions for astrophysics in the forthcoming…
Photometric redshifts are a key tool to extract as much information as possible from planned cosmic shear experiments. In this work we aim to test the performances that can be achieved with observations in the near-infrared from space and…
Oumuamua, the first known object of extrasolar origin seen to enter our Solar System, has multiple unusual characteristics that, taken together, are very difficult to explain with conventional astronomical entities like asteroids and…
The origin of cosmic rays is one of the major unresolved questions in astrophysics. In particular, the highest energy cosmic rays observed possess macroscopic energies and their origin is likely associated with the most energetic processes…
An extremely sensitive all-sky survey will be carried out in the millimetre/submillimetre waveband by the forthcoming ESA mission Planck Surveyor. The main scientific goal of the mission is to make very accurate measurements of the spatial…
We discuss the opportunities for astronomical discovery via ground-based astrometry carried out in the United States during the 2010-2020 decade. We describe imminent scientific breakthroughs that can be achieved at both classic astrometric…
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) ( http://spherex.caltech.edu ) is a proposed all-sky spectroscopic survey satellite designed to address all three science goals in NASA's…
Telescope and detector developments continuously enable deeper and more detailed studies of astronomical objects. Larger collecting areas, improvement in dispersion and detector techniques, and higher sensitivities allow detection of more…
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…
The advanced interferometer network will herald a new era in observational astronomy. There is a very strong science case to go beyond the advanced detector network and build detectors that operate in a frequency range from 1 Hz-10 kHz,…
Physicists have pondered the origin of cosmic rays for over a hundred years. However the last few years have seen an upsurge in the observation, progress in the theory and a genuine increase in the importance attached to the topic due to…
THESEUS is a medium size space mission of the European Space Agency, currently under evaluation for a possible launch in 2032. Its main objectives are to investigate the early Universe through the observation of gamma-ray bursts and to…
A primary goal of a deep-sea neutrino telescopes as ANTARES is the search for astrophysical neutrinos in the TeV-PeV range. ANTARES is today the largest neutrino telescope in the Northern hemisphere. After the discovery of a cosmic neutrino…