Документ взят из кэша поисковой машины. Адрес оригинального документа : http://www.atnf.csiro.au/nca/Antarctic.pdf Дата изменения: Tue Sep 20 08:53:05 2005 Дата индексирования: Mon Oct 1 20:07:44 2012 Кодировка: Поисковые слова: cassini spacecraft

International Antarctic Facilities
Submission to Decadal Plan Working Group 3.1
M.J.Burton

April 2005
Futur e Antarctic facilities (i nternati onal) ALTA The Australian Large Telesc ope ­ Antarctica (ALTA) was first proposed in 2000. ALTA is an optical/I R telesc ope with a diameter of bet ween 6.5 and 8. 4 metres. In the midinfrared, ALTA would have about a factor of ten better sensitivity than all existing 8metre telescopes. At short er wav elengths, through the near-IR and into the visible, ALTA would outperform all existing telescopes in both sensitivity and spatial res olution by a wide margin. It would be the most capable ground-bas ed telescope in the world until the first ELTs were built, and even then would retain unique advantages for many types of obs ervations. The science cas e for ALTA is currently under development; some performance estimates can be found in Pub. Ast. Soc. Aus., 18, 158-165 (2001). Inter fer ometr y Sci ence Demonstr ator This project aims to deploy t wo s mall infrared telescopes to Dome C to demonstrate the scientific possibilities of long-bas eline I R interf erometry for Antarctica. First deploy ment could be as early as 2007. IPY During the Int ernational Polar Year (2007 ­ 8) it is propos ed to deploy a suit e of sitetesting instruments to the highest point on the Antarctic plat eau, Dome A. See http://www.ipy.o rg/ This site is ex pected to be the best ground bas ed site av ailable, especially for terahertz observ ations. Instrumentation for the IPY deploy ment will be supplied by a number of countries, with Australia providing some instruments plus the field laboratory itself. KEOPS/ API These are t wo i US) that aim t o for extremely hi these projects. 185 (2004). nternational interferomet er project s (KEOPS is led by France, API by the deploy multiple 2-metre class infrared telescopes to Dome C Antarctica gh-res olution imaging. Australia is a likely participant in one or both of See Proc. SPIE, 5491, 1580 ­ 1586 (2004) and Proc. SPIE, 5491,176 ­


G MTA The Giant Magellan Telescope ­ Antarctica will be based on the Giant Magellan Telescope planned for c onstruction in Chile. GMTA will be sited on the high Ant arctic plateau, where the favourable at mos pheric conditions will give it massiv e performanc e gains over all other Extremely Large Telescopes. A description of GMTA is available in Proc SPIE, 5382, 76-84 (2004).