T. R. Lauer (NOAO), DESTINY Science Team
We describe a mission concept for a 1.8-meter near-infrared (NIR) grism-mode space telescope optimized to return richly sampled Hubble diagrams of Type Ia and Type II supernovae (SNe) over the redshift range 0.5 < z < 1.7 for determining cosmological distances, measuring the expansion rate of the Universe as a function of time, and characterizing the nature of dark energy. The central concept for our proposed Dark Energy Space Telescope (DESTINY) is an all-grism NIR survey camera. SNe will be discovered by repeated imaging of an area located at the north ecliptic pole. Grism spectra with resolving power l/Dl = R * 100 will provide broad-band spectrophotometry, redshifts, SNe classification, as well as valuable time-resolved diagnostic data for understanding the SN explosion physics. Our approach features only a single mode of operation, a single detector technology, and a single instrument. Although grism spectroscopy is slow compared to SN detection in any single broad-band filter for photometry, or to conventional slit spectra for spectral diagnostics, the multiplex advantage of observing a large field-of-view over a full octave in wavelength simultaneously makes this approach highly competitive. In this poster we present exposure simulations to demonstrate the efficiency of the DESTINY approach.
Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.