NGST: a feasibility study of the Next Generation Space Telescope

We present the preliminary results of a feasibility study performed by a team of scientists and engineers from NASA, academia and industrial concerns. The candidate concept is a deployable 8 meter diameter telescope optimized for the near infrared region (2 - 5 microns), but with instruments capable of observing from the visible all the way to 30 microns. The observatory is radiatively cooled to about 30 K and would be launched on an Atlas II-AS to the Lagrange point L2.