Lifan Wang
Texas A&M
Abstract:
I will describe the 2007/2008 IPY Panda project, a collaboration among Chinese, Australia, and US astronomers. The project will quantify the site properties of Dome A, Antarctica for building an astronomical observatory. We will also perform a science survey using a set of small telescopes (CSTAR) to obtain light curves of a few thousand stars with time resolution of around 10 seconds, continuously for about 130 days. I will discuss a three-step plan that may eventually lead to the construction of a wide field survey telescopes at Dome A/C that can address scientific topics from the formation of planets around stars to the physics of the universe. The first step involves site surveys and the small telescope array CSTAR; this will be used as a probe of photometric precisions achievable at Dome A. The instrument of this project is near completion and will be deployed at Dome A in Jan. 2008. The second step involves the construction of a set of Schmidt telescopes optimized for transient phenomena and imaging polarimetry. The science goal is to quantify the zoology of transient sources on the sky, and produce the first wide field imaging polarimetry map of the sky. The telescopes are expected to be delivered to Dome A on Jan 2010. The third step is to build a wide field 4 meter telescope which can be used as a cosmological probe.