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Appendix B: Astrophysics Science Division Missions
Pages 66-75

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From page 66...
... . Launched in February 2016, the new Hitomi program's goal was to seek insights on evolutionary characteristics of some of the universe's largest structures, behavior of matter in gravity fields, black hole spins, internal structures of neutron stars, and the physics of particle jets.
From page 67...
... Through 2016, over 2,000 papers using Kepler or K2 data have been published. Impact on the Current and Future Health of the Relevant Scientific Communities The Kepler mission has contributed to an explosion of the exoplanet community in astrophysics, to the point that it seems like astrophysics has become "all exoplanets all the time." Public interest in exoplanet research is very
From page 68...
... Scientific Productivity NuSTAR has investigated a variety of high-energy astrophysical issues, such as detecting nuclear line emission from Ti in young supernova remnants; revealing supermassive black holes (active galactic nuclei) that are mostly hidden by large quantities of absorbing gas; showing the emission from the halos around black holes, where the light is bent by the gravity within the system; and resolving a significant fraction of the hard X-ray background.
From page 69...
... The technology development conducted for the WISE payload includes the following: the cryogenic readout for the WISE 1024 × 1024 Si:As detector arrays that provides more resources to detect longwave IR, which maintains competition and potentially lowers the cost of future missions; the 5-micron 1024 × 1024 HgCde detectors, which could also benefit future Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) missions; and the WISE advanced telescope design developed by L-3 SSG-Tinsley, which utilizes lower cost materials
From page 70...
... This includes, but is not limited to, maintaining the Earth-orbiting mission operations capabilities from JPL; the science data processing and archiving capabilities from the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech; and the expertise on solar system small bodies, brown dwarfs, galaxy clusters, and active galactic nuclei from both institutions. Conclusions WISE provided orders of magnitude improvements in the sensitivity of all-sky surveys in the mid-infrared, being hundreds of times more sensitive than the Infrared Astronomical Satellite at 12 and 22 microns, and hundreds of thousands times more sensitive than the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment at 3.4 and 4.6 microns.
From page 71...
... Impact on the Current and Future Health of the Relevant Scientific Communities Swift has made significant strides in the field of gamma-ray bursters, but its primary mission has become much broader. It responds to outbursts of many different types of astronomical objects (e.g., tidal disruption events)
From page 72...
... These capabilities have transformed the mission, giving it greatly improved scientific breadth, from which it continues to be a high-value NASA asset, as judged from several NASA Astrophysics Senior Reviews. JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE The 2000 astronomy and astrophysics decadal survey ranked the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
From page 73...
... It was launched June 11, 2008, and has been working without degradation since full science deployment in August 2008. The 5-year prime phase ended in 2013, and it continues to operate in extended phase, following successful evaluations by the Senior Review panels.
From page 74...
... . The pipeline infrastructure developed for Fermi-LAT to process data using approximately 1,000 CPUs, track all data products and processes, and seamlessly utilize international supercomputing resources has been adapted for use on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.
From page 75...
... . It has made a variety of unique scientific contributions, carried forward by an active scientific community, with most publications from guest observers.


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