Related papers: PRIMA General Observer Science Book Volume 2
The ESA Gaia mission uses two telescopes to create the most ambitious survey of the Galaxy. The angle between them must be known with exquisite precision and accuracy. An interferometer: the Basic Angle Monitoring system measures its…
We describe the scientific objectives and instrument design of the ASPIICS coronagraph launched aboard the Proba-3 mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) on 5 December 2024. Proba-3 consists of two spacecraft in a highly elliptical…
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), presently under construction, is a revolutionary astronomical interferometer, that will operate at (sub)millimeter wavelengths. With unprecedented sensitivity, resolution, and imaging…
The Diffuse Microwave Emission Survey (DIMES) has been selected for a mission concept study for NASA's New Mission Concepts for Astrophysics program. DIMES will measure the frequency spectrum of the cosmic microwave background and diffuse…
The Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, is the largest flying observatory ever built,consisting of a 2.7-meter diameter telescope embedded in a modified Boeing 747-SP aircraft. SOFIA is a joint project between NASA…
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), NASA's next flagship observatory, has significant mission time to be spent on surveys for general astrophysics in addition to its three core community surveys. We considered what types of…
The All-sky Medium Energy Gamma-ray Observatory eXplorer (AMEGO-X) is designed to identify and characterize gamma rays from extreme explosions and accelerators. The main science themes include: supermassive black holes and their connections…
The Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (Ariel) is the first space mission dedicated to measuring the chemical composition and thermal structures of thousands of transiting exoplanets. Ariel was adopted in 2020 as the…
We present the results of integration and characterization of the SPIDER instrument after the 2013 pre-flight campaign. SPIDER is a balloon-borne polarimeter designed to probe the primordial gravitational wave signal in the degree-scale…
[JDEM-Omega is one of the three concepts that contributed to the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) mission advocated by the Astro2010 Decadal Survey. It is the concept on which the recommended observatory configuration is…
The Gamma-Ray Imager (GRI) is a novel mission concept that will provide an unprecedented sensitivity leap in the soft gamma-ray domain by using for the first time a focusing lens built of Laue diffracting crystals. The lens will cover an…
The PRime-focus Infrared Microlensing Experiment (PRIME) will be the first to conduct a dedicated near infrared (NIR) microlensing survey by using a 1.8m telescope with a wide field of view of 1.45 ${\rm deg^{2}}$ at the South African…
PRISMA is a demonstration mission for formation-flying and on-orbit-servicing critical technologies that involves two spacecraft launched in low Earth orbit in June 2010 and still in operation. Funded by the Swedish National Space Board,…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) has two scientific objectives of cosmological focus: to probe the expansion rate of the universe, and to understand stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds and their implications for early…
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…
The question "How did we get here and what will the future bring?" captures the human imagination and the attention of the National Academy of Science's Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Commitee (AASC). Fulfillment of this "fundamental…
NASA's proposed WFIRST-AFTA mission will discover thousands of exoplanets with separations from the habitable zone out to unbound planets, using the technique of gravitational microlensing. The Study Analysis Group 11 of the NASA Exoplanet…
The NASA LISA Study Team was tasked to study how NASA might support US scientists to participate and maximize the science return from the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission. LISA is gravitational wave observatory led by ESA…
Clusters of galaxies are unique laboratories for investigating the dependence of galaxy evolution on their environment. The Herschel Virgo Cluster Survey (HeViCS) mapped the central 84 square degrees region of the Virgo Cluster in five…
With the INTEGRAL observatory, ESA has provided a unique tool to the astronomical community revealing hundreds of sources, new classes of objects, extraordinary views of antimatter annihilation in our Galaxy, and fingerprints of recent…