Exploring the NRO Opportunity for a Hubble-sized Wide-field Near-IR Space Telescope -- NEW WFIRST

Abstract

We discuss scientific, technical and programmatic issues related to the use of an NRO 2.4m telescope for the WFIRST initiative of the 2010 Decadal Survey. We show that this implementation of WFIRST, which we call "NEW WFIRST," would achieve the goals of the NWNH Decadal Survey for the WFIRST core programs of Dark Energy and Microlensing Planet Finding, with the crucial benefit of deeper and/or wider near-IR surveys for GO science and a potentially Hubble-like Guest Observer program. NEW WFIRST could also include a coronagraphic imager for direct detection of dust disks and planets around neighboring stars, a high-priority science and technology precursor for future ambitious programs to image Earth-like planets around neighboring stars.

76 pages, 26 figures -- associated with the Princeton "New Telescope Meeting"

References in corpus (4)

• Report of the Dark Energy Task Force
• Wide-Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) Final Report
• Simultaneous Falsification of LCDM and Quintessence with Massive, Distant Clusters
• Discovery of an extended halo of metal-poor stars in the Andromeda spiral galaxy

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The High Latitude Spectroscopic Survey on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
• Linear bias and halo occupation distribution of emission line galaxies from Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
• A Comparative Study of Convolutional Neural Networks for the Detection of Strong Gravitational Lensing
• Simulating properties of emission line galaxies from Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope