NEW Telescopes (NWNH Enabling Wide-Field) Michael Strauss (with thanks to David Spergel) aka “National Reconnaissance Office” (NRO) Telescope

These telescopes are left-overs from an obselete DoD program of ~15 telescopes.

A team was assembled to put together a science case to use these telescopes in the WFIRST context. WFIRST: a wide- field NIR ~1.5m telescope

This solid angle could potentially double!

Open Questions Faster and Better? YES; Cheaper? Probably not. But the political momentum is there! Geosynchronous or L2? What can we do without modifying the telescope? Funding possibilities? Probably, better than before What does this mean for LSST? IR complement likely producing data on comparable time-scale. Fantastic news for photo-zs and weak lensing.  Political question: who is responsible for reprocessing LSST + Euclid + NEW data?

Scientific potential for science other than weak lensing is completely unexplored. Could exposures be divided to give an interesting cadence for variability? There are two such telescopes; what should the second telescope do (if funds available)? A coronagraph, perhaps? A UV imager? We can fantasize about transient follow-up; what would the ideal space-based instrument be?

A Conference about the NRO/NEW Telescopes How should the astronomical community best use these telescopes? Princeton, September 4-6, 2012 http://www.princeton.edu/astro/news- events/public-events/new-telescope- meeting/