Astronomical Instrumentation of the Future

6.4 Summary

The technology available to the astrophysicist will continue to expand almost geometrically — telescopes will continue to get bigger, and better. We have seen that realistic plans for AO-assisted telescopes with up to 100 times larger light gathering power than the Keck telescopes are being actively pursued. Integral field spectroscopy on these telescopes would bring a dynamical analysis of high-redshift objects within the range of feasibility. A parallel development with millimeter and sub-millimeter arrays is also taking place. The next-generation radio telescope (λ ≳ 1 cm), SKA, will extend the utility of centimeter-wave astronomy to cosmological issues through its sensitivity to 21-cm hydrogen emission at a spatial resolution of ~ 0.1 arcsec. The millimeter, sub-millimeter and entimeterm wave telescopes will provide spatial resolution comparable to that of the planned giant optical telescopes. Finally, two space telescopes, one, Spitzer, already in service, and the other, JWST, will ultimately provide great advances in the IR and NIR. These telescopes will complement the Earth-based telescopes in the same way that HST and Keck are complementary — space telescopes for very deep, precise work, and large ground telescopes as the work-horses of analysis.