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Session 71 - Space Astronomy in the Next Millennium.
Display session, Wednesday, January 17
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
We present our concept for Iris, an ultraviolet (UV, \lambda\sim1000-3000Åimaging mission which will provide exciting new capabilities in both angular and spectral resolution.
Iris will use a tuneable UV filter to provide continusly adjustable wavelength and variable bandwidth. Iris will provide subarcsecond resolution UV images over a \sim10arcmin field. By taking advantage of both the extremely dark sky background in the far UV as well as the factor \sim4 improvement in diffraction pattern size of the far UV relative to the optical, Iris will have a major impact on UV imaging capabilities using a modest sized (\sim1 m) telescope.
Scientific problems to be tackled with Iris include: making detailed diagnoses of the hot interstellar medium; obtaining a more complete understanding of the origins and evolution of galaxies; measuring the energy balance of hot gas in galaxies and clusters of galaxies; and determining properties and dynamics of gas in and around active galaxies at redshifts up to z\sim2.2.
The Iris mission will facilitate major new scientific discoveries and will fill a unique and important role in the NASA Astrophysics Program.
