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H. Ford, L. Bianchi, T. Heckman, W. Moos, C. Norman (JHU), S. Baum, M. Giavalisco, A. Nota, A. Riess, K. Sahu, R. Somerville, M. Stiavelli (STScI), J. Crocker, R. Woodruff (LMC), R. Bacon (Obs. Univ-Lyon1), D. Ebbetts (BATC), K. Freeman (ANU), J. Green, M. Shull (UC Boulder), J. Hutchings (NRC Canada), J. Silk (Oxford), C. Steidel (CIT), S. Tsuneta (NAO Japan), T. de Zeeuw (Univ. Leiden)
A no-new-technology HST-class observatory with COS and WFC3 as its core instruments can be launched to LEO on a Delta IV H or Atlas 541 long fairing by 2010 with an estimated cost of ~$1 Billion. Considerable cost savings are achieved by drawing from a large inventory of HST spare parts. Technology developed and perfected since HST was built 25 years ago allows us to build HOP with a much lighter mirror and OTA than those in HST. HOP will be unaberrated, making the telescope much easier to test on the ground than an intentionally aberrated telescope. In addition to replacing the aberration-correcting optics in COS and WFC3, we will extend the wavelength range of COS down to 110 nm and modify the filter complement of the WFC3.
Our Japanese partners are leading the development of a high throughput, Very Wide Field Imager (VWFI) that achieves a field of view approximately 17 times larger than the ACS by tiling one half of the unaberrated focal plane with CCDs. An accompanying poster describes a novel optical solution for correcting the astigmatism and field curvature in HOP’s HST-like wide field of view Ritchey-Chretein design. The thick, deep depletion Hamamatsu CCDs in the VWFI are optimized for the near infrared, and have ~90% QE at 900 nm and ~70% QE at 1000 nm.
We are exploring with our European partners the concept of an Integral Field Spectrograph operating from 200 nm to 1000 nm. The IFS would replace STIS's moderate resolution capability in the near-UV and optical, and simultaneously provide a spectrograph that is up to 30 times faster than STIS when observing extended objects.
This work was supported in part by NASA grant NNG04GQ04G.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.