The NSERC CREATE training program on New Technologies for Canadian Observatories (NTCO) has been a unique collaboration between academia, government, and industry to advance innovation in astronomical instrumentation while fostering knowledge exchange as part of an advanced student training program. Through strategic partnerships and funding support, NTCO facilitated the creation of industrial internship opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students in physics, astronomy, and engineering, enabling them to gain valuable professional experience while making high impact contributions to cutting-edge research projects. The NTCO program included nearly 200 supervisors (a third in industry) working together to successfully bridge the gaps between academia, government, and industry, through 70 industrial internships (37 graduate, 33 undergraduate) over the seven-year duration of the program. This paper will outline the key activities and outcomes of the NTCO program, ranging from our strategies in recruiting a diverse group of students and matching them with appropriate industrial internship experiences, to the benefits of advanced summer school training, peer support, annual general meetings, and professional skills development courses for our participants.
A space-based far-infrared interferometer could work synergistically with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to revolutionize our understanding of the astrophysical processes leading to the formation of habitable planets and the co-evolution of galaxies and their central supermassive black holes. Key to these advances are measurements of water in its frozen and gaseous states, observations of astronomical objects in the spectral range where most of their light is emitted, and access to critical diagnostic spectral lines, all of which point to the need for a far-infrared observatory in space. The objects of interest – circumstellar disks and distant galaxies – typically appear in the sky at sub-arcsecond scales, which rendered all but a few of them unresolvable with the successful and now-defunct 3.5-m Herschel Space Observatory, the largest far-infrared telescope flown to date. A far-infrared interferometer with maximum baseline length in the tens of meters would match the angular resolution of JWST at 10x longer wavelengths and observe water ice and water-vapor emission, which ALMA can barely do through the Earth’s atmosphere. Such a facility was conceived and studied two decades ago. Here we revisit the science case for a space-based far-infrared interferometer in the era of JWST and ALMA and summarize the measurement capabilities that will enable the interferometer to achieve a set of compelling scientific objectives. Common to all the science themes we consider is a need for sub-arcsecond image resolution.
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