Wide-Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) Final Report

Abstract

In December 2010, NASA created a Science Definition Team (SDT) for WFIRST, the Wide Field Infra-Red Survey Telescope, recommended by the Astro 2010 Decadal Survey as the highest priority for a large space mission. The SDT was chartered to work with the WFIRST Project Office at GSFC and the Program Office at JPL to produce a Design Reference Mission (DRM) for WFIRST. Part of the original charge was to produce an interim design reference mission by mid-2011. That document was delivered to NASA and widely circulated within the astronomical community. In late 2011 the Astrophysics Division augmented its original charge, asking for two design reference missions. The first of these, DRM1, was to be a finalized version of the interim DRM, reducing overall mission costs where possible. The second of these, DRM2, was to identify and eliminate capabilities that overlapped with those of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (henceforth JWST), ESA's Euclid mission, and the NSF's ground-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (henceforth LSST), and again to reduce overall mission cost, while staying faithful to NWNH. This report presents both DRM1 and DRM2.

102 pages, 57 figures, 17 tables

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Cited by in corpus (93)

• Wide-Field InfrarRed Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets WFIRST-AFTA 2015 Report
• Effect of a High Opacity on the Light Curves of Radioactively Powered Transients from Compact Object Mergers
• Radioactivity and thermalization in the ejecta of compact object mergers and their impact on kilonova light curves
• Predictions of the WFIRST Microlensing Survey I: Bound Planet Detection Rates
• Euclid preparation: II. The EuclidEmulator -- A tool to compute the cosmology dependence of the nonlinear matter power spectrum
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: single-probe measurements and the strong power of normalized growth rate on constraining dark energy
• A Sub-Earth-Mass Moon Orbiting a Gas Giant Primary or a High Velocity Planetary System in the Galactic Bulge
• On the Orbits of Low-mass Companions to White Dwarfs and the Fates of the Known Exoplanets
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: single-probe measurements from CMASS anisotropic galaxy clustering
• Non-parametric spatial curvature inference using late-universe cosmological probes
• The High Latitude Spectroscopic Survey on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
• Reconstruction of Galaxy Star Formation Histories through SED Fitting: The Dense Basis Approach
• The First Circumbinary Planet Found by Microlensing: OGLE-2007-BLG-349L(AB)c
• Defining a weak lensing experiment in space
• Testing the general theory of relativity using gravitational wave propagation from dark standard sirens
• Exoplanets as Sub-GeV Dark Matter Detectors
• Evaluation of probabilistic photometric redshift estimation approaches for The Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)
• A Detection of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Features in the SDSS BOSS DR12 Galaxy Bispectrum
• Cosmic voids in modified gravity models with massive neutrinos
• Properties and characteristics of the WFIRST H4RG-10 detectors
• Deconstructing the neutrino mass constraint from galaxy redshift surveys
• Galaxy Infall Kinematics as a Test of Modified Gravity
• HST/WFC3 grism observations of $z\sim 1$ clusters: The cluster vs. field stellar mass-size relation and evidence for size growth of quiescent galaxies from minor mergers
• The Redshift-Space Cluster-Galaxy Cross-Correlation Function: I. Modeling Galaxy Infall onto Millennium Simulation Clusters and SDSS Groups
• WFIRST-2.4: What Every Astronomer Should Know
• Microlensing Searches for Exoplanets
• Predicting the redshift 2 Halpha luminosity function using [OIII] emission line galaxies
• Solar System Science with ESA Euclid
• Detectability of High-Redshift Superluminous Supernovae with Upcoming Optical and Near-Infrared Surveys - II. Beyond z=6
• A Synthetic Roman Space Telescope High-Latitude Imaging Survey: Simulation Suite and the Impact of Wavefront Errors on Weak Gravitational Lensing
• Massive and modified gravity as self-gravitating media
• On the road to percent accuracy III: non-linear reaction of the matter power spectrum to massive neutrinos
• Cosmic voids detection without density measurements
• Constraining spatial curvature with large-scale structure
• Prediction of H$\alpha$ and [OIII] Emission Line Galaxy Number Counts for Future Galaxy Redshift Surveys
• Photometric redshifts with machine learning, lights and shadows on a complex data science use case
• Cross-correlation between Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Galaxy Weak Lensing and Planck Cosmic Microwave Background Lensing
• Optimal Reconstruction of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations for DESI 2024
• Testing gravity on cosmological scales with cosmic shear, cosmic microwave background anisotropies, and redshift-space distortions
• VVV Survey Microlensing Events in the Galactic Center Region
• The first analytical expression to estimate photometric redshifts suggested by a machine
• The Impact of Interpixel Capacitance in CMOS Detectors on PSF shapes and Implications for WFIRST
• White Paper: Measuring the Neutrino Mass Hierarchy
• The effective theory of fluids at NLO and implications for dark energy
• A one-parameter formula for testing slow-roll dark energy: observational prospects
• Linear bias and halo occupation distribution of emission line galaxies from Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
• High-redshift SMBHs can grow from stellar-mass seeds via chaotic accretion
• Exploring Photometric Redshifts as an Optimization Problem: An Ensemble MCMC and Simulated Annealing-Driven Template-Fitting Approach
• Predicting emission line fluxes and number counts of distant galaxies for cosmological surveys
• An anisotropic universe due to dimension-changing vacuum decay
• Higher order statistics of shear field: a machine learning approach
• Exploring the NRO Opportunity for a Hubble-sized Wide-field Near-IR Space Telescope -- NEW WFIRST
• Second-order gauge-invariant formalism for the cosmological observables: Complete verification of their gauge-invariance
• A new method to measure galaxy bias by combining the density and weak lensing fields
• Jacobi Mapping Approach for a Precise Cosmological Weak Lensing Formalism
• Exploring Mirror Twin Higgs Cosmology with Present and Future Weak Lensing Surveys
• VVV Survey Microlensing: the Galactic Latitude Dependence
• Distance Probes of Dark Energy
• A large population of strongly lensed faint submillimetre galaxies in future dark energy surveys inferred from JWST imaging
• The impact of cosmic variance on simulating weak lensing surveys
• Tetrad formalism for exact cosmological observables
• Spectroscopic QUasar Extractor and redshift (z) EstimatorSQUEzE I: Methodology
• Clustering in the Simulated H$\alpha$ Galaxy Redshift Survey from Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
• Effects of NII and H$\alpha$ Line Blending on the WFIRST Galaxy Redshift Survey
• The Demographics of Wide-Separation Planets
• Deep Learning in Wide-field Surveys: Fast Analysis of Strong Lenses in Ground-based Cosmic Experiments
• Machine learning synthetic spectra for probabilistic redshift estimation: SYTH-Z
• Higher order moments of lensing convergence - I. Estimate from simulations
• On the Fast Random Sampling and Other Properties of the Three Point Correlation Function in Galaxy Surveys
• Facilities for Dark Energy Investigations
• GEO-FPT: a model of the galaxy bispectrum at mildly non-linear scales
• Kepler K2 Campaign 9: I. Candidate short-duration events from the first space-based survey for planetary microlensing
• Measuring galaxy environment with the synergy of future photometric and spectroscopic surveys
• NASA ExoPAG Study Analysis Group 11: Preparing for the WFIRST Microlensing Survey
• Weak Lensing Study in VOICE Survey II: Shear Bias Calibrations
• An Ising model for galaxy bias
• Identification of single spectral lines in large spectroscopic surveys using UMLAUT: an Unsupervised Machine Learning Algorithm based on Unbiased Topology
• General Relativistic Effects in Weak Lensing Angular Power Spectra
• DAmodel: Hierarchical Bayesian Modelling of DA White Dwarfs for Spectrophotometric Calibration
• Extended Fast Action Minimisation method: application to SDSS-DR12 Combined Sample
• Reworking the SETI Paradox: METI's Place on the Continuum of Astrobiological Signaling
• Weak Lensing Constraints on Dark Matter-Baryon Interactions with $N$-Body Simulations and Machine Learning
• Awakening of two $\gamma$-ray high redshift flat-spectrum radio quasars in the southern hemisphere
• Incompatibility of Standard Galaxy Bias Models in General Relativity
• Using gamma regression for photometric redshifts of survey galaxies
• Predicting the Sufficient-Statistics Power Spectrum for Galaxy Surveys: A Recipe for $P_{A\ast }(k)$
• Cosmological constraints from galaxy multi-tracers in the nearby Universe
• Mapping the cosmic expansion history from LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA in synergy with DESI and SPHEREx
• Simulating properties of emission line galaxies from Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
• Towards an Astronomical Science Platform: Experiences and Lessons Learned from Chinese Virtual Observatory
• Kepler Microlens Planets and Parallaxes
• Bayesian vs Frequentist: Comparing Bayesian model selection with a frequentist approach using the iterative smoothing method
• Confirmation of the Planetary Microlensing Signal and Star and Planet Mass Determinations for Event OGLE-2005-BLG-169