Thursday, August 17, 2017

The Next Frontier

NASA has selected six missions for further study as part of the Explorers Program.

The three full Explorers missions are:

1. Arcus - an X-ray spectroscopy mission to study the gas around stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters.

2. FINESSE - an infrared spectroscopy mission to study planet formation.

3. SPHEREx - a near-infrared imaging program that should tell us more about the beginning of the universe and evolution of galaxies.

Three more missions, called "missions of opportunity" are also being studied.

1. COSI-X - a gamma-ray telescope mounted in a balloon to study antimatter and radioactive elements.

2. ISS-TAO - an X-ray detector that will be put on the ISS to look for supernova shocks, neutron star bursts and neutron star mergers.

3. CASE - fine guidance detectors for the ESA"s exoplanet survey.

I think I'm most interested in SPHEREx and of course the exoplanet survey is important. Most likely - they're out there...

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