Athena, the Advanced Telescope for High Energy Astrophysics, is the next flagship X-ray observatory, planned for launch by the European Space Agency (ESA) in the early 2030s with a significant contribution from NASA.
Research projects
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST) is a mission designed to study dark energy, the evolution of galaxies, and the populations of extrasolar planets. A smaller version was the leading recommended large space-based project in the recent decadal survey and was later expanded to use a 2.4-m primary mirror. A 300-megapixel infrared camera gives it a field of view a hundred times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, allowing unprecedented surveys of the infrared sky.
The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-meter telescope operating at the National Science Foundation's South Pole research station. Designed for conducting large-area millimeter and sub-millimeter wave surveys to map primary and secondary anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, SPT is the largest telescope ever deployed at the South Pole. Currently, the third generation "SPT-3G" camera is surveying the southern sky to make an ultra-sensitive map of CMB polarization across 1500 sq. degrees, and construct an unprecedented catalog of high redshift galaxy clusters…