ORION

Public Mission Homepage

Last Updated: April 28, 2006 9:30 AM MST

ORION is a NASA MIDEX Mission proposal to construct and fly an optical/UV orbiting telescope to survey star formation environments near and far, under Principal Investigator Dr. Paul Scowen. The NASA AO for the next round of MIDEX missions is scheduled for release in October 2007. This round would result in a launch in late 2013.

This website is intended for public delivery of information concerning the mission. If you have a question about the mission, please contact the Project.

Recently presented poster paper on the Orion Mission at the 207th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC in January 2006. [PDF, 38.6 MB]

Overview

The ORION MIDEX mission is a 1.2m UV-visual observatory orbiting at L2 that will conduct the first-ever high spatial resolution survey of a statistically significant sample of visible star-forming environments in the Solar neighborhood in emission lines and continuum. This survey will be used to characterize the star and planet forming environments within 2.5 kpc of the Sun, infer global properties and star formation history in these regions, understand how the environment influences the process of star and planet formation, and develop a classification scheme for star forming regions incorporating the earlier results.

Based on these findings the science team will conduct a similar high spatial resolution survey of large portions of the Magellanic Clouds, applying the classification scheme from local star forming environments to analogous regions in nearby galaxies, extending the classification scheme to regions that do not have nearby analogs but are common in external galaxies. The results from the local survey will allow the characterization of low mass star forming environments in the Magellanic Clouds, study the spatial distribution of star forming environments and analyze stellar population photometry to trace star formation history.

Finally the mission will image a representative sample of external galaxies using the same filters used to characterize nearby star formation regions. The distribution of star forming region type will be mapped as a function of galactic environment for galaxies out to ~5 Mpc to infer the distribution and history of low-mass star formation over galactic scales, characterize the stellar content and star formation history of galaxies, and relate these results to the current star forming environments in these galaxies. Ultimately the intent of the mission science program is to use these diagnostics to extrapolate to star formation environments in the higher redshift Universe.

ORION MIDEX Science Team

Paul Scowen (ASU), Matthew Beasley (U. Colorado), Jeff Hester, Rogier Windhorst, Steven Desch, Rolf Jansen (ASU), Daniela Calzetti (STScI), Deborah Padgett (JPL/IPAC), Patrick Hartigan (Rice U.), Sally Oey (U. Michigan), John Bally (U. Colorado), John Gallagher (U. Wisconsin), Robert O'Connell (U. Virginia) and Mark McCaughrean (U. Exeter)