Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems launch creates new space exploration forum

Detail from Figure 4 in "Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite," Ricker et al.: Artist's conception of the TESS spacecraft and payload.

BELLLINGHAM, Washington, USA -- The first issue of the new Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems (JATIS) has been launched by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. All articles will be freely available through the end of 2015 in the SPIE Digital Library. Mark Clampin, SPIE Fellow and James Webb Space Telescope Observatory Project Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, is editor-in-chief.

"A key motivation for the creation of this journal has been the continuing success of SPIE's Instrumentation in Astronomy conference series, which started in 1972 and remains a focal point for reporting new results in the field," Clampin said. "The conference's proceedings have long provided a point of reference for researchers working in astronomical instrumentation and techniques. SPIE's experience in technical journals, combined with the legacy of its conference series, uniquely distinguish JATIS."

SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014 hosted more than 2,200 presentations last June in Montréal. The biennial meeting has become the premier event for space observation technology.

The publication's goal is to provide a refereed journal dedicated to reporting new developments in astronomical instrumentation and its associated technologies.

"With the growing complexity of observatories on the ground and in space and their instrumentation, these technologies now include engineering, integrated modeling, control systems and sensors, to name a few," Clampin said. "Software has also grown in importance, both for instrument control, data pipeline processing, operations, and the ever more sophisticated algorithms required to analyze observations. And, large surveys and survey instrumentation are increasingly relying on data mining techniques, while relatively new observational techniques such as transit spectroscopy are increasingly relying on new statistical approaches for retrieval of instrumental signatures and astrophysical parameters."

The first articles are organized topically by ground- and space-based telescopes; detector systems and sensor technologies; and wavefront sensing, active and adaptive optics, and control systems. They include:

• Flux-pinning mechanisms for improving cryogenic segmented mirror performance, Jessica Gersh-Range, Cornell University, et al.
• Edgewise connectivity: an approach to improving segmented primary mirror performance, Jessica Gersh-Range, Cornell University, et al.
• Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, George Ricker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, et al.
• Improving active space telescope wavefront control using predictive thermal modeling, Jessica Gersh-Range, Cornell University, and Marshall Perrin, Space Telescope Science Institute
• Carbon nanotube optical mirrors, Peter Chen, Lightweight Telescopes, Catholic University of America, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Douglas Rabin, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Enhancing the noise performance of monolithic microwave integrated circuit-based low noise amplifiers through the use of a discrete preamplifying transistor, Mark A. McCulloch, University of Manchester, et al.
• Scintillation properties of strontium iodide doped with europium for high-energy astrophysical detectors: nonproportionality as a function of temperature and at high gamma-ray energies, Rose Schmitt Perea, Vanderbilt University, et al.
• Interferometric nulling limits with tip-tilt-piston deformable mirrors and a pinhole spatial filter array, Brian Hicks, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, et al.
• Improvements on adaptive optics control approaches: experimental tests of wavefront correction forecasting, Dario Del Moro, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", et al.

"I look forward to JATIS becoming the leading refereed journal for reporting the development of astronomical instrumentation in this exciting environment with so many discoveries and breakthroughs to come," Clampin said.

JATIS initially will be printed quarterly, increasing in frequency as the journal grows, with each article published online in the SPIE Digital Library upon approval.

The SPIE Digital Library contains more than 420,000 articles from SPIE journals and proceedings, as well as more than 200 eBooks. Abstracts are freely searchable, and an increasing number of full articles in the society's 10 peer-reviewed journals are published with open access. Approximately 18,000 new research papers, eBooks, and other publications are added each year.

SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The Society serves nearly 256,000 constituents from approximately 155 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional networking, and patent precedent. SPIE provided more than $3.2 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2013.

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