Orion MIDEX Project 
Horus Origins Probe Concept Study |
Orion MIDEX Mission Originally conceived as a "cute idea" back in 2001, between faculty members at ASU and members of the local aerospace industry here in Phoenix, the Orion MIDEX mission concept has come a long way. At this time (2007) we have a well defined science program, a low-risk technological solution, and have selected our partners for the project through a RFP process conducted in tandem with our NASA Center partners JPL. The mission is a 1.2m UV-optical imaging telescope with a very wide field of view, and a large FPA producing a 14 arcminute square at 0.1 arcsecond resolution using CCD detectors. We are currently partnered with General Dynamics and Goodrich to produce the mission. However, the larger issue right now is that NASA has not issued an AO for a MIDEX mission in over 5 years, and the most recent intended date for such a release was lost as NASA decided to re-channel the targeted funds into production of three SMEX opportunities. We are continuing to develop the only remaining technological piece for the design - the detectors - under partnership with JPL. See articles above on our efforts in that theater. |
Horus Origins Probe Concept Study Back in 2003 NASA had started considering a series of missions that were described as targeting the various goals laid out in the NASA Origins Roadmap. At that time NASA was open to ideas and concepts and had expressed great interest in the Orion concept. In early 2004, the President announced his Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) and as part of that endeavour NASA immediately solicited proposals to study what an Origins Probe mission would look like (modeling them on the Beyond Einstein probes already being developed). Of the 30+ proposals submitted a set of about a dozen groups were selected to conduct 12-month studies. Horus was a hubble-class mission with its science roots in the Orion MIDEX mission, but with a next-generation COS-like UV spectrograph, and a much larger aperture. The study went very well and pursued an aggressive schedule to define the science program using a full Design Reference Mission process to yield not only a world-class science case, but with our partners in Lockheed-Martin, a well-defined technological solution with a very low-risk profile. The final set of studies was presented verbally and in written form to NASA in early 2005. Of those presented Horus was almost alone in providing both the science program and the technological design to achieve it. After that delivery, NASA entered a tight funding era motivated by the need to rechannel funds into the Manned Spaceflight program, with the removal of the firewall between science and aerospace, and as such the Origins Probes were backburnered. This state continued until mid-2007 when the new ASMCS opportunity was announced in preparation for the upcoming Decadal Survey, and all the Origins Probes teams were solicited to propose to redevelop their studies. |
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Astrophysics Strategic Mission Concept Studies (ASMCS) Every ten years or so the National Academy in conjunction with a variety of agencies conducts a Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. This survey considers a variety of inputs from various facets of the business to determine what should be considered as "vital" science that should be pursued by federal dollars over the next ten years. In preparation for this exercise, NASA has announced another set of concept studies, under the banner ASMCS. As part of this process the teams that produced the previous Origins Probes Concept Studies have been resolicited to propose to continue / extend / update their original work from 2004 to provide the most up-to-the-minute input on cutting edge research and projects to the Decadal Survey process. The studies will be 12 months in length and will likely start in March 2008. Proposals for this opportunity are due Nov 20, 2007. The original Horus team has been reassembled with notable additions to produce another world-class study that will hopefully affect the direction that astronomical research will follow over the next decade. |
Astronomy and Physics Research and Analysis (APRA) Balloons Each year NASA solicits proposals from the technology development community and from the sub-orbital observational / hardware community for new projects to be funded by modest funding lines under the APRA banner. This line has been responsible in the past for development of new cutting edge detector technology as well as funding sub-orbital balloon and rocket flights. In 2007, NASA made a policy decision to restrict all future large-budget mission (SMEX and above) Principal Investigators to those people who had proven experience with other missions that had already flown. Since this is a very small community, NASA has announced that this required experience can be obtained by heading up balloon or rocket missions, and in order to foster the development of a new generation of PI-eligible scientists, NASA is intending to fund a much larger number of balloon and rocket programs as part of the 2008 APRA opportunity. At this time many of us are teaming together to field proposals for balloon projects to develop the optical designs for Orion and Horus in a testbed environment and try to use the new generation of Ultra-Long Duration balloons to establish an observational foundation for the science programs for these two missions. Proposals are likely due in Spring 2008. |
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Teaching - Astronomical Instrumentation and Data Analysis Working with several observational astronomers here at ASU, we continue to develop and present to our graduate students a periodic class on Astronomical Instrumentation and Data Analysis. The class was last offered in Fall 2006. The class webpage is available here. The intent of the class is to equip the students with the tools and background necessary to use the many astronomical facilities here in Arizona to acquire and reduce the data they are going to need for their thesis work. Up to this point the class has had a very deliberate emphasis on Astronomy, but with the recent move of the ASU astronomers to the new School of Earth and Space Exploration, the next presentation of this class will in all likelihood attempt to merge the technological needs and specifications of the remote sensing world used in Geology with the Astronomical material already developed. We expect to re-offer the new class in Fall 2008. |
M51 Star Formation Tracking Project Nearing Fruition
As part of an archival program, we have been studying the broadband images of M51 taken as part of the public release program done with the ACS/WFC [Program 10452]. With graduate student Katie Kaleida, we have been using the star clusters in the galaxy to track the ages of the stars and map out the recent (<13 million years) star formation progression across the disk of the galaxy. This work is nearly complete and will be submitted for publication very soon. This is work that is part of a larger program to study the overall star formation process in M51 as sampled and imaged using other passbands with missions such as GALEX and Spitzer.
LASI Lab Operational - First Light Images From New Detectors
In direct collaboration with the Nanoscience and Advanced Detector Arrays Group at JPL, our group has been working over the past 2 years to develop a new paradigm for CCD detector development. Using foundry stock CCDs from LBNL, the JPL group is using a combination of their proprietary Delta-Doping technique and custom-built AR coatings to custom-tune the response function of the resulting CCDs to whatever the user application needs. The specific example our project has been moving towards is the creation of optimized detectors for both a red- and blue-channel modes for our Orion MIDEX mission design. The approach of producing highly customized CCDs from the same foundry stock will significantly drive down the cost of detector production and FPA population in future space mission designs. Despite NASAs short-sightedness in not funding this work out of the APRA line, we continue to develop the approach and the prototype detectors using research infusion funds from both JPL and ASU. The current work is now yielding calibrated results after months of hard work by graduate student Todd Veach. The images above are from new 1k x 1k prototypes from JPL that have been red-channel optimized. The readout is through a Leach controller and uses twin amplifier circuits to produce a fast, high-signal output. The testbed uses a tunable monochromator with a NIST-certified photodiode to accurately measure the responsivity of the chips as a function of wavelength, illuminance, temperature, pressure, and other physical parameters.
