Related papers: The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Space debris is a major threat to the satellite infrastructure. A collision with even small particle, e.g. 1 cm of size, can cause a catastrophic event when the parent body, spacecraft or upper stage, will break up into hundreds of…

The Fermi Gamma ray Space Telescope, launched in 2008, has over 16 years of operations providing gamma ray (8 keV to 300 Gev) spectra science observations of cosmic phenomena. It continues to provide invaluable research for the astrophysics…

Current large-aperture cosmic microwave background (CMB) telescopes have nearly maximized the number of detectors that can be illuminated while maintaining diffraction-limited image quality. The polarization-sensitive detector arrays being…

The Simons Observatory will map the temperature and polarization over half of the sky, at millimeter wavelengths in six spectral bands from the Atacama Desert in Chile. These data will provide new insights into the genesis, content, and…

A 30 m class optical/near-IR telescope in the Northern Hemisphere, equipped for diffraction-limited imaging and high-resolution, multi-object spectroscopy of faint stars, would enable a transformational investigation of the formation and…

Negotiations began 1n 1968 for a telescope facility at Perth Observatory for NASA's International Planetary Patrol Network. 1,000 days later the telescope saw first light. The facility bears no resemblance to other observatories. Inside a…

With a collecting area of 70 000 m^2, the Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) will allow for great advances in pulsar astronomy. We have performed simulations to estimate the number of previously unknown pulsars FAST will…

A project to construct a 17 m diameter imaging air Cherenkov telescope, called the MAGIC Telescope, is described. The aim of the project is to close the observation gap in the gamma-ray sky extending from 10 GeV as the highest energy…

Due to the efforts by numerous ground-based surveys and NASA's Kepler and TESS, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of transiting exoplanets ideal for atmospheric characterization via spectroscopy with large platforms such as JWST and…

Neutrino telescopes are unrivaled tools to explore the Universe at its most extreme. The current generation of telescopes has shown that very high energy neutrinos are produced in the cosmos, even with hints of their possible origin, and…

We present statistics on the research productivity of astronomical telescopes. These were compiled by finding papers in which new data were presented, noting which telescopes were used, and then counting the number of papers, number of…

This article summarizes a workshop held on March, 2014, on the potential of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to revolutionize our knowledge of the physical properties of exoplanets through transit observations. JWST's unique…

Balloon-borne astronomy is a unique tool that allows for a level of image stability and significantly reduced atmospheric interference without the often prohibitive cost and long development time-scale that are characteristic of space-borne…

In May 1997 a consistent part of the services and structures committed to the industry had already been released to the commissioning group. The telescope itself was, with the exception of the Nasmyth derotators, motors and all the optics…

The overarching goal of planetary astronomy is to deduce how the present collection of objects found in our Solar System were formed from the original material present in the proto-solar nebula. As over two hundred exo-planetary systems are…

Interferometry has brought many new constraints in optical astronomy in the recent years. A major leap in this field is the opening of large interferometric facilities like the Very Large Telescope Interferometer and the Keck Interferometer…

Binary stars are crucial laboratories for stellar physics, so have been photometric targets for space missions beginning with the very first orbiting telescope (OAO-2) launched in 1968. This review traces the binary stars observed and the…

Extremely large telescopes (ELTs) are considered worldwide to be one of the highest priorities in ground-based astronomy. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is developing an ELT that will have a 39 m main mirror and will be the largest…

The Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) is one of the four focal plane instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope. In this paper, we summarize the in-orbit performance of NIRSpec, as derived from data collected during its commissioning…

We summarize the scientific potential of high contrast optical space imaging for studies of extrasolar planets, debris disks, and planet formation. The unique scientific capabilities offered by a 2-m class optical telescope, the technical…