ORION
Public Mission Homepage
Last Updated: September 17, 2010 1:59 PM MST
ORION is a NASA Explorer 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 Explorer missions is scheduled for release in late 2010. This round would result in a launch in late 2018.
This website is intended for public delivery of information concerning the mission. If you have a question about the mission, please contact the Project.
Overview
The ORION Explorer mission is a 1.1m UV-visual observatory orbiting at LEO 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, and understand how the environment influences the process of star and planet formation.
Based on these findings the science team will conduct a similar high spatial resolution survey of large portions of the Magellanic Clouds. 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.
ORION Explorer Science Team
Paul Scowen (ASU, PI), Rolf Jansen (ASU, PS), Matthew Beasley (Colorado U., IS), Daniela Calzetti (U. Mass), Steven Desch, (ASU), Patrick Hartigan (Rice U.), Chris Johns-Krull (Rice U.), Robert O'Connell (U. Virginia), Sally Oey (U. Michigan), Deborah Padgett (Caltech/SSC), Nathan Smith (UC Berkeley), Rogier Windhorst (ASU)
