https://cor.gsfc.nasa.gov/stigs/irstig/events/irstig-webinars.php





Dear Colleague,
 
A reminder (and a change!) for our next webinar this coming Monday, February 3rd at 3pm Eastern / 12pm Pacific.  
 
Please see the IRSTIG webinar page here for connection information.

We will have two presentations this month from Sunil Golwala (CalTech) and Chris Stark (GSFC).  Dr. Golwala will provide us with an update on the Leighton Chajnantor Telescope and Dr. Stark will share about detector technology selection for HWO. Titles and abstracts below.  
 
As a reminder, if you or someone who works with you is not on the IRSTIG mailing list, please sign up here! This is the primary method we have to share news of our upcoming events and community announcements. Please feel free to forward on this message to your colleagues and students.
 
Looking forward to seeing you at the webinar!
•	Candice Fazar on behalf of the IRSTIG Leadership Council
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Sunil Golwala (California Institute of Technology)

Title: An Update on the Leighton Chajnantor Telescope

Abstract: The Leighton Chajnantor Telescope (LCT) will be a new facility for submillimeter and millimeter astronomy and cosmology. It will explore a new frontier in the transient astronomical sky at these wavelengths via unparalleled spectral coverage and flexibility to focus on transient alerts. It will enable new probes of the hot gas in galaxy clusters and the circumgalactic medium and tomography in [CII] and CO from Cosmic Noon out to the Epoch of Reionization. LCT will undertake new surveys to study the role of and nature of dust in environments ranging from planetary and stellar nurseries in our own galaxy to galaxies at cosmological distances. Critical to these new capabilities will be a suite of instruments building on cutting-edge technologies including multiband focal planes, single-chip spectrometers, and quantum-limited amplifier arrays. LCT will redeploy the 10m Leighton Telescope of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory - the highest accuracy submm telescope that currently exists - to Cerro Toco in Chile, with first light planned for 2027. I will discuss the science planned for LCT, the instrumentation that will enable it, and the current status of the project.

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Christopher C. Stark (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

Title: Toward detector requirements for the Habitable Worlds Observatory's coronagraphic instruments

Abstract: The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) seeks to detect and characterize potentially Earth-like planets around other stars from the UV to the NIR. Earth-like exoplanets will be among the faintest objects ever detected by a telescope and will require high efficiency, low noise detectors. The HWO Technology Maturation Project Office is considering a broad range of detector technologies as architecture trades progress. In this talk I will briefly summarize some of the scientific motivators for observations from the UV to NIR. I will then describe the methods HWO will use to estimate the impact of different detector technologies on scientific productivity, discuss the impacts of several different visible wavelength detector technologies, and present preliminary guidelines for NIR detector requirements. Finally, I will discuss our path forward for refining these requirements.