U. professors join wide field of scholars working on NASA telescope

University professors David Spergel and N. Jeremy Kasdin will be leading the newest NASA space telescope project as adjutant scientists of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which is estimated to be launched in 2024, according to the website for mechanical and aerospace engineering.

WFIRST is a NASA observatory that makes use of a telescope roughly the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, which will perform wide-field imaging and surveys of the near-infrared sky.

Several other members of the University, including professor Adam Burrows ’75, associate professor Jenny Greene, associate research scholar Tyler Groff and senior research scientist in astrophysical sciences Robert Lupton, will be part of the investigation teams that include over 200 scientists from several institutions and will be responsible for ensuring that WFIRST meets the objectives of the worldwide scientific community.

The NASA Program Scientist for the WFIRST project, Dr. Dominic Benford, explained that the WFIRST is a multipurpose project. The goal is to carry out cosmological surveys that study the distribution of dark matter in the millions of galaxies, which will be captured by the telescope, and to image the gas exoplanets with an additional coronagraph instrument.

Spergel noted that the telescope had originally been built as a U.S. spy satellite as part of the National Reconnaissance Office that monitors earth. When this project was canceled and the telescope was donated to NASA in 2012, Spergel and Kasdinwere asked to determine how the telescope could be utilized for astronomical observations.

“We realized that we could not only use it [the telescope] with the wide-field camera that I’m leading the science for, but also the coronagraph that Jeremy Kasdin and his lab had developed,” he said in a conference at the University to which members of the scientific, aerospace and engineering communities were invited.

Although astronomers had identified WFIRST as the top priority for space missions in a 2010 survey of the decade, the program only became a full project on Feb. 19and is a commitment priority for NASA, Spergel noted.

Although the telescope is being re-purposed from an existing structure, Benford commented that the costs for the project have been projected to be $2-3 billion, as most of the technology will have to be refurbished or modified. Benford added that the telescope is currently in the design phase and that much of the hardware for the instrument itself still doesn’t exist, so the costs are still a rough estimate.

Kasdin noted that plans for the initial WFIRST project were intended for a much smaller telescope. However, the new re-purposed telescope would include 2.4-meter mirrors, which could allow the addition of the coronagraph instrument and provide a wider field of view.

Benford explained that this telescope would help analyze the distribution of dark matter by allowing scientists to measure the shapes of hundreds of millions of galaxies and then making careful computation techniques based on the slight distortions in these shapes. He said the coronagraph helps in studying exoplanets by suppressing a star's light by a factor of almost a billion, without affecting the light from the exoplanet.

Benford added that the project would allow scientists to gain an understanding of the curvature of space and the acceleration of the universe by measuring the change in the light curves of type Ia supernovas as a function of distance, and then calculating the geometry of this supernova based on the given information.

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Compared to previous technology like the Hubble Telescope, WFIRST will produce images of the same quality but with an area that is 100 times greater, Benford noted. In about half a year, the WFIRST would be able to uncover information that would take the Hubble Telescope a century to discover.

Lupton, one of the co-investigators who is part of the cosmology and Type Ia Supernova team, said the University has traditionally been connected with the strongest departments in the world in astrophysical theory. Over the last 15 years, the University has become a major presence in survey astronomy partly due to the SDSS project, led by Professor Emeritus James E. Gunn, which revolutionized observational astronomy, he added.

“WFIRST is the next big thing to happen in NASA for space astronomy and astrophysics and Princeton is well positioned to take advantage of it’s capabilities in the broad spectrums of science,” Burrow said.

Burrow is part of the team that is working on coronagraphs.

“There are going to be challenges down the road but if it succeeds technologically and is launched successfully it will be part of a new era in astronomy,” Burrows added.

According to Spergel, the biggest budget item that NASA spends on is the space station. However apart from that, the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched in 2018, and then NASA’s efforts will be focused on the WFIRST.

“It’s great that Princeton is so deeply involved and I anticipate the coming decade will involve a number of Princeton students, both graduates and undergraduates, in both aspects of the planning and when the mission is launched,” Spergel added.