Origins Space Telescope (Origins): Solar System Science

The Origins Space Telescope (Origins) is a 2020 Decadal mission concept that will trace our cosmic history, from the formation of the first galaxies and the rise of metals and dust to the development of habitable worlds and present-day life. With more than three orders of magnitude improvement in sensitivity over prior far-infrared missions and access to a spectral range spanning nearly eight octaves (2.8-588 microns), Origins vastly expands the discovery space available to the community. Origins is also an agile observatory, capable of tracking moving objects > 60 mas/s, and executing rapid survey science. This presentation describes a sampling of Solar System science cases to illustrate the capabilities of this breakthrough mission. For example, Origins can advance our knowledge of the thermal history and present-day climate and circulation patterns of the Giant Planets, providing a ground-truth catalog of giant planet variability as a resource to the exoplanet community. Origins can deliver a survey of the sizes and thermal properties of small bodies in the outer Solar System, allowing us to probe the history and evolution of our Solar System. No survey has been done on this scale before. Origins can trace the origin of water on Earth and in our Solar System by determining the D/H ratio in hundreds of comets, providing, for the first time, a statistically-significant sample of this critical fingerprint for the origin of water on Earth. We thank NASA HQ, GSFC, JPL, and NASA-Ames for their support of the study. To learn more about Origins see our websites (https://origins.ipac.caltech.edu and https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/firs/) and report (https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/firs/docs/OriginsVolume1MissionConceptStudyReport.pdf).