Workshop Overview:
This one-week workshop was a forum to explore new concepts that enable major scientific advances at modest cost in the far-IR / submm spectral range. Far-IR astronomy is typically driven toward expensive, flagship-class missions, primarily because optimal sensitivity requires a large cold collecting area in space and novel detector approaches. This workshop looked for opportunities to make new break-through measurements without flagship-class budgets. The participants generated a list of promising concepts and ideas, and key questions for further study. Their detailed assessment is beyond the scope of the workshop but they could be pursued afterward with analysis, modeling, and engineering studies. While some ideas may prove impractical until new technology is available, others might evolve into near-term mission and instrument designs.
Sessions were organized for science motivation and wish-lists, break-out sessions for innovation areas (e.g. cooling, optics, architecture), for coordination and integration of break-outs, and for summary and distillation.
The intent was to be completely unconstrained in brainstorming, except, of course, by the laws of physics.
Team Leads
-
George Helou
California Institute of Technology
-
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- James Aguirre — University of Pennsylvania
- Lee Armus — Caltech
- Dominic Benford — NASA / GSFC
- Andrew Blain — Caltech
- Jamie Bock — JPL
- Matt Bradford — JPL
- Ranga Chary — Caltech
- Mark Devlin — University of Pennsylvania
- Darren Dowell — JPL
- Mark Dragovan — JPL
- Sunil R Golwala — Caltech
- Martin Harwit — Cornell University
- George Helou — Caltech
- Warren Holmes — JPL
- Al Kogut — Goddard Space Flight Center
- Mark Lysek — JPL
- Harvey Moseley — NASA/GSFC
- Eric Murphy — Caltech
- Christopher Paine — JPL
- Jean-Loup Puget — Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale
- Mike Seiffert — JPL
- Tom Soifer — Caltech
- Jonas Zmuidzinas — Caltech
Presentations
| Speaker | Affiliation | Presentation |
|---|---|---|
| Jonas Zmuidzinas | Caltech | Plenary Session: Progress and Prospects in Direct Detectors |
| Mark Devlin | University of Pennsylvania | BLAST (.pdf) |
| Al Kogut | GSFC | ARCADE (.pdf) |
| Mark Lysek | JPL | Spitzer Thermal Architecture (.pdf) |
| Ranga Chary | Caltech | History of IR-Bright Galaxies in the last half of the Universe (.pdf) |
| Matt Bradford | JPL | Spectroscopy From the Ground and Space |
| Darren Dowell | JPL | Opportunities for Dust Polarization Studies (.pdf) |
