Abstract
WISH, Wide-field Imaging Surveyor for High-redshiftt, is a space mission concept to conduct very deep and widefield surveys at near infrared wavelength at 1-5μm to study the properties of galaxies at very high redshift beyond the epoch of cosmic reionization. The concept has been developed and studied since 2008 to be proposed for future JAXA/ISAS mission. WISH has a 1.5m-diameter primary mirror and a wide-field imager covering 850 arcmin 2 . The pixel scale is 0.155 arcsec for 18μm pitch, which properly samples the diffraction-limited image at 1.5μm. The main program is Ultra Deep Survey (UDS) covering 100 deg 2 down to 28AB mag at least in five broad bands. We expect to detect >10 4 galaxies at z=8-9, 10 3 -10 4 galaxies at z=11-12, and 50-100 galaxies at z>14, many of which can be feasible targets for deep spectroscopy with Extremely Large Telescopes. With recurrent deep observations, detection and light curve monitoring for type-Ia SNe in rest-frame infrared wavelength is also conducted, which is another main science goal of the mission. During the in-orbit 5 years observations, we expect to detect and monitor >2000 type-Ia SNe up to z̃2. WISH also conducts Ultra Wide Survey, covering 1000deg 2 down to 24-25AB mag as well as Extreme Survey, covering a limited number of fields of view down to 29-30AB mag. We here report the progress of the WISH project including the basic telescope and satellite design as well as the results of the test for a proto-model of the flip-type filter exchanger which works robustly near 100K. © 2012 SPIE.