Astro2020 Activity, Project of State of the Profession Consideration (APC) White Paper: All-Sky Near Infrared Space Astrometry. State of the Profession Considerations: Development of Scanning NIR Detectors for Astronomy

Understand

Gaia is a revolutionary space mission developed by ESA and is delivering 5 parameter astrometry, photometry and radial velocities over the whole sky with astrometric accuracies down to a few tens of micro-arcseconds.

• A weakness of Gaia is that it only operates at optical wavelengths.
• However, much of the Galactic centre and the spiral arm regions, important for certain studies, are obscured by interstellar extinction and this makes it difficult for Gaia to deeply probe.
• This problem can be overcome by switching to the Near Infra-Red (NIR) but this is not possible with silicon CCDs.