ZWICKY TRANSIENT FACILITY

该合同将支持Zwicky瞬变设施（ZTF）的建设、运营和数据管理/分发，ZTF是帕洛马山上48英寸Oschin Schmidt望远镜的相机升级和翻新。该望远镜将进行广域巡天，目标是在从我们的太阳系内部到宇宙“跨越”距离的很大一部分范围内，识别新型罕见的、快速变化的天文来源。这项工作的更广泛的影响包括学生和早期职业科学家的实践训练，他们正在开发用于大面积天空调查的仪器。专业知识将在STEM领域得到发展，并将为NSF的重大新项目LSST提供重要的技能。ZTF将在美国各地举办一年一度的时域暑期学校，并将通过帕洛马天文台游客中心的外展项目与公众分享动态天空的兴奋。该设施将对高节奏时域天文学进行概括性调查，目标是识别罕见的、快速变化的源。这些来源将包括超新星、奇异的瞬变爆炸、不寻常的恒星变量、致密双星、活动星系核和小行星。ZTF的调查将覆盖整个北方天空，在几个小时的时间尺度上重新访问各个领域，每年对每个领域进行数百次访问。这种浅宽快的节奏非常适合于探测快速瞬变和探测快速变异性。20.4等的单次观测深度与目前4米级望远镜上的光谱仪非常匹配，而最终的联合添加图像将提供比斯隆数字巡天深约两个星等的广阔天空覆盖范围。新相机将拥有47平方度的视野，比60年前用同样的望远镜在玻璃板上记录的原始帕洛玛巡天望远镜更大。提案团队在该领域拥有丰富的经验，在此之前已经运行了类似但功能较弱的Palomar Transient Factory多年。该项目得到了许多合作机构的支持，包括加州理工学院（牵头）、红外处理和分析中心（IPAC）、劳伦斯伯克利实验室、魏茨曼科学研究所（以色列）、奥斯卡克莱因中心（瑞典）、DESY（高能天文学，德国）、洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室、探戈（台湾）、威斯康星大学密尔沃基分校、大学间天文学和天体物理学中心（印度）和波莫纳学院。

This award will support construction, operation, and data management/distribution for the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a camera upgrade and renovation for the 48-inch Oschin Schmidt telescope on Mt Palomar. The telescope will conduct wide-area sky surveys with a goal of identifying new types of rare, rapidly varying astronomical sources at locations ranging from inside our own Solar System to significant fractions of the distance "across" the universe. Broader impacts of the work include hands-on training of students and early career scientists developing instrumentation for large area sky surveys. Expertise will be developed in STEM fields and will lead to skills important for NSF's major new project, the LSST. The ZTF will conduct an annual time-domain summer school open to students throughout the US, and will share the excitement of the Dynamic Sky with the public via an outreach program at the Palomar Observatory Visitors' Center. The facility will conduct a synoptic survey for high-cadence time-domain astronomy with the goal of identifying rare, fast-varying sources. These sources will include supernovae, exotic explosive transients, unusual stellar variables, compact binaries, active galactic nuclei, and asteroids. The ZTF survey will cover the entire Northern Sky, revisiting fields on timescales of a few hours and providing hundreds of visits per field each year. This shallow-wide-fast cadence is well suited to detecting fast transients and probing rapid variability. The single-visit depth of 20.4mag is well-matched to current spectrographs on 4-m class telescopes, while the final co-added images will provide wide sky coverage that is about two magnitudes deeper than that of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The new camera will have a 47 square degree field of view, larger than the original Palomar Sky Survey which was recorded on glass plates using this same telescope almost 60 years ago. The proposing team has substantial experience in this field, having run the similar but less powerful Palomar Transient Factory for a number of years previous to this. The project is leveraged by contributions from a number of partner institutions, including Caltech (lead), the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), the Oskar Klein Centre (Sweden), DESY (High Energy Astronomy, Germany), Los Alamos National Laboratory, TANGO (Taiwan), the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the Intra-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (India), and Pomona College.