ST-ECF involvements in NGST

This is an outline of the current involvement of the ST-ECF in NGST activities in Europe with links to some of the work in progress.

• Piero Benvenuti is on the ESA/NASA Working Group which is negotiating the groundwork for a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the agencies which will cover both the continued access of ESA member states to HST and the collaboration on NGST. See ECF Newsletter No. 25 - page 2.
• Bob Fosbury is a member of the ESA NGST Study Science Team (SST) which is currently monitoring the studies being funded by ESA. He is also one of the European members of the US Ad Hoc Science Working Group - ASWG
• Stefano Cristiani is a member of the ESA funded NGST spectrograph study being carried out by Laboratoire d'Astronomie Spatiale (Marseilles) and Dornier Satellitensysteme (Ottobrun)

Current topics of concern to the SST which are being investigated at the ST-ECF are:

• A trade-off study of the Integral Field (IFS) and Multi-object (MOS) spectrograph concepts in the context of the Design Regerence Mission (DRM)
• A study of the generic red-leak/scattered light properties of wide-wavelength coverage cameras and spectrographs.
• A survey of VLT optical/NIR spectrographic capability. Contribution to the ASWG NIRSpec subcommittee (7 October 1999).
• Some notes for the 2nd telecon of the ASWG NIRSpec subcommittee (18 October 1999)
• Some notes for the 3rd telecon of the ASWG NIRSpec subcommittee (28 October 1999)

For the ESA SST, Bob Fosbury is collecting questions to be addressed by the various intstrument studies in preparation for the Woods Hole Exposition in September. The current status of these questions is being maintained on this website.