Cryoscope Pathfinder

We propose to install and operate at Concordia station a fully cryogenic, 26 cm aperture near-infrared telescope – Cryoscope Pathfinder – with a radically innovative optical and thermal design for very wide field imaging and diffraction-limited performance. The telescope will operate in the K-dark band (2.4 µm), taking advantage of the extreme darkness of the Antarctic sky at this wavelength: less than 1% of the background flux at temperate latitude observatories. The telescope will operate during the long Antarctic winter nights to discover and characterize transiting exoplanets with long orbital periods and to provide unique phase curves of both transiting and non-transiting hot Jupiters. It will also participate in the monitoring of transient events such as Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) and multiple facets of Galactic time-domain astronomy. Coordination with ASTEP (Antarctica Search for Transiting Planets) operations will enable monitoring of these events simultaneously in the optical and infrared, vastly improving the confidence in the detections and their scope, in terms of scientific information available.

While Cryoscope Pathfinder will deliver new science, it serves as a quarter-scale prototype to retire technical risks for a future wide-field 1-m class cryogenic telescope that will be uniquely powerful for multi-messenger astrophysics. The full-scale telescope will have the volumetric survey speed of Rubin Observatory’s y-band survey and contribute discoveries across a breadth of astrophysics, e.g., discovery of interstellar comets/asteroids, discovery of transiting habitable super-Earths around M-dwarfs, and discovery of electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves.