e-Article
The Science Case for an Extended Spitzer Mission
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article
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Yee, Jennifer C; Fazio, Giovanni G; Benjamin, Robert; Kirkpatrick, J Davy; Malkan, Matt A; Trilling, David; Carey, Sean; Ciardi, David R; Apai, Daniel; Ashby, MLN; Ballard, Sarah; Bean, Jacob L; Beatty, Thomas; Berta-Thompson, Zach; Capak, P; Charbonneau, David; Chesley, Steven; Cowan, Nicolas B; Crossfield, Ian; Cushing, Michael C; Wit, Julien de; Deming, Drake; Dickinson, M; Dittmann, Jason; Dragomir, Diana; Dressing, Courtney; Emery, Joshua; Faherty, Jacqueline K; Gagne, Jonathan; Gaudi, B Scott; Gillon, Michael; Grillmair, Carl J; Harris, Alan; Hora, Joseph; Ingalls, James G; Kataria, Tiffany; Kreidberg, Laura; Krick, Jessica E; Lowrance, Patrick J; Mahoney, William A; Metchev, Stanimir A; Mommert, Michael; Mueller, Michael Migo; Shvartzvald, Yossi; Smith, Howard; Stevenson, Kevin B; Teplitz, HI; Willner, SP
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Abstract
Although the final observations of the Spitzer Warm Mission are currentlyscheduled for March 2019, it can continue operations through the end of thedecade with no loss of photometric precision. As we will show, there is astrong science case for extending the current Warm Mission to December 2020.Spitzer has already made major impacts in the fields of exoplanets (includingmicrolensing events), characterizing near Earth objects, enhancing ourknowledge of nearby stars and brown dwarfs, understanding the properties andstructure of our Milky Way galaxy, and deep wide-field extragalactic surveys tostudy galaxy birth and evolution. By extending Spitzer through 2020, it cancontinue to make ground-breaking discoveries in those fields, and providecrucial support to the NASA flagship missions JWST and WFIRST, as well as theupcoming TESS mission, and it will complement ground-based observations by LSSTand the new large telescopes of the next decade. This scientific programaddresses NASA's Science Mission Directive's objectives in astrophysics, whichinclude discovering how the universe works, exploring how it began and evolved,and searching for life on planets around other stars.