Title : Journey of Aspera from a whiteboard to drawings and beyond - development of Aspera, the UV Small-Satellite for mapping warm-hot gas in nearby galaxy halos

Speaker : 정하은 박사님 (Dr. Haeun Chung)

Date & Time : 2022.03.25 (Fri) 10:30 AM

Location : Online (https://yonsei.zoom.us/j/94609827293?pwd=dmIxV2lFc3g2emdIRC9YWXAvZjNsdz09, PASSWORD:astrograd, It will be open at 10:00) * 문의: 정애리 교수, achung@yonsei.ac.kr

Abstract

Aspera is a new UV Small-Satellite mission to detect and map the warm-hot phase halo gas(10^5-10^6 K) around the nearby galaxies, led by the University of Arizona (PI: Carlos Vargas).The warm-hot phase gas occupies a considerable fraction of the galaxy baryonic mass budget.However, its amount and distribution are poorly unknown observationally. Aspera is specificallydesigned to observe those gas via UV spectroscopic observation of O VI line emission at 103.2nm, a proxy of hot phase gas. The high sensitivity of Aspera down to 5E-19 ergs/s/cm2/arcsec^2as well as a large field of view of 30 arcsec x 1 degrees allow detecting the faint O VI lineemission efficiently. Aspera has been selected as one of the inaugural NASA AstrophysicsPioneers missions in early 2021. It has passed its conceptual design review and is now in thepreliminary design phase, with a launch date of mid-2025. In this talk, I will present thejourney of Aspera from the concept to the mission development while introducing the scienceobjective and payload design of the Aspera mission.

* Talk to be delivered in English

Biography

2021 -             Present Assistant Research Professor, University of Arizona 

2019 – 2021   Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Arizona 

2019               Ph.D. Astronomy, Seoul National University

2012               B.A. Physics, POSTECH