Astro2020 Science White Paper: Science Platforms for Resolved Stellar
  Populations in the Next Decade
  Over the past decade, research in resolved stellar populations has made great
strides in exploring the nature of dark matter, in unraveling the star
formation, chemical enrichment, and dynamical histories of the Milky Way and
nearby galaxies, and in probing fundamental physics from general relativity to
the structure of stars. Large surveys have been particularly important to the
biggest of these discoveries. In the coming decade, current and planned surveys
will push these research areas still further through a large variety of
discovery spaces, giving us unprecedented views into the low surface brightness
Universe, the high surface brightness Universe, the 3D motions of stars, the
time domain, and the chemical abundances of stellar populations. These
discovery spaces will be opened by a diverse range of facilities, including the
continuing Gaia mission, imaging machines like LSST and WFIRST, massively
multiplexed spectroscopic platforms like DESI, Subaru-PFS, and MSE, and
telescopes with high sensitivity and spatial resolution like JWST, the ELTs,
and LUVOIR. We do not know which of these facilities will prove most critical
for resolved stellar populations research in the next decade. We can predict,
however, that their chance of success will be maximized by granting use of the
data to broad communities, that many scientific discoveries will draw on a
combination of data from them, and that advances in computing will enable
increasingly sophisticated analyses of the large and complex datasets that they
will produce. We recommend that Astro2020 1) acknowledge the critical role that
data archives will play for stellar populations and other science in the next
decade, 2) recognize the opportunity that advances in computing will bring for
survey data analysis, and 3) consider investments in Science Platform
technology to bring these opportunities to fruition.
