Related papers: First Light SOFIA Instruments
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…
Some attempts to predict the very distant future of Radio Astronomy are given. It is not easy to predict a list of the first priority problems which may appear, but the facilities potential is more predictable. It is suggested, that in…
WEAVE, the new wide-field, massively multiplexed spectroscopic survey facility for the William Herschel Telescope, will see first light in late 2022. WEAVE comprises a new 2-degree field-of-view prime-focus corrector system, a nearly…
Gaia is currently revolutionizing modern astronomy. However, much of the Galactic plane, center and the spiral arm regions are obscured by interstellar extinction, rendering them inaccessible because Gaia is an optical instrument. An…
The International X-ray Observatory (IXO) is a joint ESA-JAXA-NASA effort to address fundamental and timely questions in astrophysics: What happens close to a black hole? How did supermassive black holes grow? How does large scale structure…
The Sun Watcher with Active Pixel System detector and Image Processing (SWAP) telescope was launched on 2 November 2009 onboard the ESA PROBA2 technological mission and has acquired images of the solar corona every one - two minutes for…
The project "Novel Astronomical Instrumentation through photonic Reformatting" is a DFG-funded collaboration to exploit the recognized potential of photonics solutions for a radically new approach to astronomical instrumentation for…
The Roman Space Telescope will have the first advanced coronagraph in space, with deformable mirrors for wavefront control, low-order wavefront sensing and maintenance, and a photon-counting detector. It is expected to be able to detect and…
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…
LISA is a proposed low resolution (R~15-30) imaging spectrometer for SOFIA, the American-German Stratospheric Observatory for Far Infrared Astronomy. Covering the wavelength range from 40micron to 220micron with three channels, LISA…
The Astro2010 Decadal Survey recommended a Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) as its top priority for a new large space mission. The report of the WFIRST-AFTA Science Definition Team (SDT) presents a Design Reference Mission for…
The Single Aperture Far-InfraRed (SAFIR) Observatory's science goals are driven by the fact that the earliest stages of almost all phenomena in the universe are shrouded in absorption by and emission from cool dust and gas that emits…
PILOT (the Pathfinder for an International Large Optical Telescope) is a proposed 2.5 m optical/infrared telescope to be located at Dome C on the Antarctic plateau. The atmospheric conditions at Dome C deliver a high sensitivity, high…
The PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (PRIMA) is a cryogenically-cooled, far-infrared (far-IR) observatory expected to begin serving the astronomical community by early 2030. The mission features two advanced instruments: PRIMAger…
Photonic technologies offer numerous advantages for astronomical instruments such as spectrographs and interferometers owing to their small footprints and diverse range of functionalities. Operating at the diffraction-limit, it is…
The Sunrise balloon-borne solar observatory consists of a 1m aperture Gregory telescope, a UV filter imager, an imaging vector polarimeter, an image stabilization system and further infrastructure. The first science flight of Sunrise…
We discuss preliminary studies concerning a large-diameter gamma-ray telescope, to be part of an array of telescopes installed at the existing observation site on the Canary island of La Palma. One of the telescopes in the array will be…
We report first white-light interferograms obtained with an integrated optics beam combiner on a glass plate. These results demonstrate the feasability of single-mode interferometric beam combination with integrated optics technology…
Having achieved 'first-light' right before the opening ceremony on September 25, 2016, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is being busily commissioned. Its innovative design requires ~1000 points to be measured…
ATUS, the Astronomical Telescope of the University of Stuttgart, is a fully remote-controlled 0.6 m f/8.17 Ritchey-Chr\'etien telescope optimized for high-cadence, high-fidelity photometry of transient sources. Observations are…