A 3.6-m Telescope on a Long-duration Balloon in the Post-HST Era: A Community-wide Facility?

Details A 3.6-m Telescope on a Long-duration Balloon in the Post-HST Era: A Community-wide Facility? A 3.6-m Telescope on a Long-duration Balloon in the Post-HST Era: A Community-wide Facility?

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21347523j&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #475.23; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.439

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Innovations in balloon technology enable significantly larger, more-massive payloads to fly at higher altitudes for 1-3 weeks, making a 3.6-m UV/visible telescope feasible. Novel optical designs as well as innovative detectors enable long-duration balloon (LDB) missions to achieve spatial resolutions comparable to HST for large fields of view and for wavelengths spanning the near-UV to visible. The UV-visible portion of the spectrum contains the highest density of diagnostic spectral features and the ability to obtain superb spatial resolution (2x that at IR) has made HST the preeminent instrument. During the eventual hiatus between the end of HST operations and future large UV-visible orbital missions, a 3.6-m telescope on an LDB platform can provide 2-3 weeks of dark-time observations per year for the general astronomical community. It can also serve as a relatively inexpensive platform to fly newly developed instrument concepts. For example, a 3.6-m telescope, equipped with either a Fabry-Perot or an integral field spectrograph, could provide velocity maps of O VI + Ly-α from the cosmic web over redshifts 0.9 < z < 1.6 as well as could empirically measure how galaxies assemble themselves from an epoch of z 1.5 to the present. These instruments would have 100x the multiplexing capability of HST. A proposed conventional balloon mission, called KITE, seeks to demonstrate the feasibility of the novel optical design plus new detector technologies, as well as verify that all pointing and thermal issues that have plagued previous missions have been mitigated. The telescope design, the KITE, and an example mission are discussed.

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