FLARE logo Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image

FLARE Meeting Announcement

Marseille, France from March 14 to March 16, 2016



FLARE is a space science mission project dedicated to observing the very high redshift universe and the first objects. FLARE will be submitted to ESA in answer to the M5 call (see Statement of Interest sent to ESA). FLARE will be a 1.8 - 2.0m telescope equipped with a 900 arcmin2 wide-field Near-IR camera and a 1-arcmin IFU that would fly in the late 2020's in order to conduct unique ultra-deep and wide-area sky surveys in the wavelength range 1-5 micron.

A small and simple Python 3 code and illustrations are available here to estimate the sensitivities. A more sophisticated code using CIGALE (http://cigale.lam.fr) is under development. It will produce simulated observations based on a full emission model. The figure below is an example of the output.

FLARE Simulations

Although galaxies beyond reionisation and the very early universe form the core (70 - 80% over 5 years) of the science objectives, FLARE's specifications and observations will be excessively useful for other topics and about 20% of FLARE's mission will be to observe regions in the Milky Way to build a survey of our galaxy and study in the IR (where the effect of dust are lower) its regions of stellar formation.

Several meetings related to WISH (FLARE's ancestor) and therefore to FLARE have been held in Japan and in France. The latest meeting being held in September 2014 in Marseille with a strong interest from the European community.

The first FLARE (First Light And Reionization Explorer) Meeting will be held in the amphitheater of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille from March 14 at 10am to March 16 at 1pm. We will have 1.5 days to discuss about FLARE's science and 1.0 days for the instrumentation.

LAM is about 20 minutes from downtown Marseille - Vieux Port (15 minutes metro and 5 minutes bus). You can easily find hotels around the Vieux-Port of Marseille.

The objective of this meeting is two-fold:

To help in the logitics, please register if you plan to attend and how many persons will come with you. You can, of course, send this announcement to any person you think would be interested.


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