{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/forecastor-i-finding-optics-requirements-and","title":"FORECASTOR -- I. Finding Optics Requirements and Exposure times for the Cosmological Advanced Survey Telescope for Optical and UV Research mission","arxiv_id":"2402.08137","date":"2024-02-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Isaac Cheng","Tyrone E. Woods","Patrick Côté","Jennifer Glover","Dhananjhay Bansal","Melissa Amenouche","Madeline A. Marshall","Laurie Amen","John Hutchings","Laura Ferrarese","Kim A. Venn","Michael Balogh","Simon Blouin","Ryan Cloutier","Nolan Dickson","Sarah Gallagher","Martin Hellmich","Vincent Hénault-Brunet","Viraja Khatu","Cameron Lawlor-Forsyth","Cameron Morgan","Harvey Richer","Marcin Sawicki","Robert Sorba"],"abstract":"The Cosmological Advanced Survey Telescope for Optical and ultraviolet Research (CASTOR) is a proposed Canadian-led 1m-class space telescope that will carry out ultraviolet and blue-optical wide-field imaging, spectroscopy, and photometry. CASTOR will provide an essential bridge in the post-Hubble era, preventing a protracted UV-optical gap in space astronomy and enabling an enormous range of discovery opportunities from the solar system to the nature of the Cosmos, in conjunction with the other great wide-field observatories of the next decade (e.g., Euclid, Roman, Vera Rubin). FORECASTOR (Finding Optics Requirements and Exposure times for CASTOR) will supply a coordinated suite of mission-planning tools that will serve as the one-stop shop for proposal preparation, data reduction, and analysis for the CASTOR mission. We present the first of these tools: a pixel-based, user-friendly, extensible, multi-mission exposure time calculator (ETC) built in Python, including a modern browser-based graphical user interface that updates in real time. We then provide several illustrative examples of FORECASTOR's use that advance the design of planned legacy surveys for the CASTOR mission: a search for the most massive white dwarfs in the Magellanic Clouds; a study of the frequency of flaring activity in M stars, their distribution and impacts on habitability of exoplanets; mapping the proper motions of faint stars in the Milky Way; wide and deep galaxy surveys; and time-domain studies of active galactic nuclei.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08137v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.08137v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"forecastor-i-finding-optics-requirements-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/CASTOR-telescope/ETC","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"forecastor-i-finding-optics-requirements-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/castor-telescope/etc_notebooks","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"forecastor-i-finding-optics-requirements-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/CASTOR-telescope/ETC_frontend","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}