The Antarctica Wide-field High-resolution Infrared Telescope (WHITE)

ABSTRACT What is a good astronomical site? It must be cold, dry, stable, dark. There is one site on Earth that qualifies : Antarctica. To make the best use of these characteristics, we propose a Wide-field (0.5-degree in diameter) High-resolution (~0.3 arcsec using GLAO from the ice), IR (0.8-5 µm) 2.4-m TEl escope (WHITE). WHITE will be dedicated to carrying out surveys: a deep extragalactic field over a few square degr ees, a survey of the Magellanic Clouds. By adding one more year, WHITE would be able to add one kilo-degree survey. Keywords: Antartica, Surveys, Infrared, Dome C, Cosmology, Magellanic Clouds 1. INTRODUCTION Astronomers are very keen on having their telescope observing from remote astronomical sites on e.g. mountain tops, or even from Space. From the beginning of astronomy, humankind has tried to increase its understanding of the universe first by looking at it with the unaided eye and then, after Galileo, by building more and more powerful telescopes. However, there is another way to improve the performances of telescopes albeit with more or less the same type of instruments, it consists in installing them on an observational site presenting better characteristics in terms of background, transparency, image quality, etc. This quest led astronomers to bu ild telescopes on those secluded, remote sites. If we try to summarize these characteristics, keywords are probably cold, dry, stable, high, dark (wavelength dependent) and it seems that there is one site on Earth that qualifies for all of them: Antarctica. To make the best use of the above exce ptional characteristics, we propose to bu ild a Wide-field (0.5-d egree in diameter) High-resolution (~0.3 arcsec using Ground Layer Adaptive Optics) Infrared (from 0.8 to 5 microns 2.4-m TElescope that we call WHITE. Quite a number of science topics can take advantage of the WHITE figures. Burton et al.