new telescopes ( n wnh e nabling w ide-field)

NEW Telescopes(NWNH Enabling Wide-

Field)Michael Strauss

(with thanks to David Spergel)

aka “National Reconnaissance Office” (NRO) Telescope

These telescopes are left-overs from an obselete DoD program of ~15 telescopes.

A team was assembled to put together a science case to use these telescopes in the WFIRST context. WFIRST: a wide-field NIR ~1.5m telescope

This solid angle could potentially double!

Open Questions• Faster and Better? YES; Cheaper? Probably not. But

the political momentum is there!

• Geosynchronous or L2?

• What can we do without modifying the telescope?

• Funding possibilities? Probably, better than before

• What does this mean for LSST? IR complement likely producing data on comparable time-scale. Fantastic news for photo-zs and weak lensing.

• Political question: who is responsible for reprocessing LSST + Euclid + NEW data?

Scientific potential for science other than weak lensing is completely unexplored. Could exposures be divided to give an interesting cadence for variability?

There are two such telescopes; what should the second telescope do (if funds available)? A coronagraph, perhaps? A UV imager? We can fantasize about transient follow-up; what would the ideal space-based instrument be?

A Conference about the NRO/NEW

TelescopesHow should the astronomical community best use these telescopes?

Princeton, September 4-6, 2012

http://www.princeton.edu/astro/news-events/public-events/new-telescope-meeting/