Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Annual Meeting of the APS Four Corners Section
Volume 60, Number 11
Friday–Saturday, October 16–17, 2015; Tempe, Arizona
Session E2: Astrophysics II: Instrumentation |
Hide Abstracts |
Chair: Quentin Bailey, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Room: MU230 |
Friday, October 16, 2015 3:17PM - 3:29PM |
E2.00001: Focal plane actuation for the development of a high-resolution suborbital telescope Alexander Miller, Paul Scowen, Todd Veach We present a hexapod stabilized focal plane as the key instrument for a proposed suborbital balloon mission. Balloon gondolas currently achieve 1-2 arcsecond pointing error, but cannot correct for unavoidable jitter movements caused by wind rushing over balloon surfaces, thermal variations, cryocoolers, and reaction wheels. The jitter causes image blur during exposures and limits the resolution of the system. To solve this, the hexapod system actuates the focal plane to counteract the jitter using position information supplied by star-trackers. Removal of this final jitter term decreases pointing error by an order of magnitude and allows for true diffraction-limited observation. This boost in resolution will allow for Hubble-quality imaging for a fraction of the cost. The alternative, tip-tilt pointing systems, require additional optics and introduce multiple reflections, while the hexapod is compact and can be plugged into the focal point of nearly any configuration. High-resolution time domain multispectral imaging of the gas giant outer planets, especially in the UV range, is of particular interest to the planetary community, and a suborbital telescope with the hexapod stabilization in place would provide a wealth of new data. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 16, 2015 3:29PM - 3:41PM |
E2.00002: Low Cost nIR/SWIR Detectors for Cosmological and Astrophysical Transient Research Robert Strausbaugh The near-infrared (nIR) and shortwave infrared (SWIR) offer a unique and relatively unexplored region of the electromagnetic spectrum to study transient sources of cosmological and astrophysical significance. Available science grade instruments to study this spectrum have very high costs, in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Military grade instruments capable of probing a similar parameter space are available at a fraction of this price, in the range of tens of thousands of dollars. One such instrument, an InGaAs camera from Goodrich has been tested and characterized for scientific use. The current capabilities of the camera offer a dark rate of 84000 $e^-/s/pix$; the pixels in this camera are 5x5 microns in size. Taking the dark as the limiting factor, the faintest source detectable at a $3\sigma$ level would have an AB magnitude of about 10 in a one second integration, on an 18-inch telescope. Future efforts with the camera involve driving down this dark current by cooling with a thermo-electric cooler (TEC). With such a low cost, the final goal of this project is to have several of these cameras working on an array of small telescopes to rival the collecting area of large, expensive telescopes and detectors at a small fraction of the cost. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 16, 2015 3:41PM - 3:53PM |
E2.00003: Development of a modern Stellar Intensity Interferometer at the University of Utah. Nolan Matthews, David Kieda, Stephan LeBohec, Patty Bolan, Abigail McBride Stellar Intensity Interferometry (SII) has recently been introduced as a viable method for performing high-resolution imaging of stellar surfaces by employing large air-cherenkov telescope arrays, typically used for gamma-ray astronomy. Unprecedented angular resolution scales on the order of tens of micro-arcseconds are attainable since the baseline separation between telescopes can be made very large (\textgreater 100m) due to the relative insensitivity of the technique to atmospheric turbulence. Given these capabilities, it is possible to image oblate and binary star systems, stellar features such as star-spots, and potentially the silhouette of orbiting exoplanets. At the University of Utah we have been working towards a modern SII system and also operate the StarBase-Utah observatory, consisting of two twin 3m diameter telescopes located in Grantsville, UT. In this talk, I will outline the capabilities of the SII technique as well as describe the progress made in imaging simulated stars in the laboratory. Additionally, I will highlight the future goals of our group which include SII observations of stars this upcoming winter using the StarBase observatory. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 16, 2015 3:53PM - 4:05PM |
E2.00004: A Full Circuit Model for SuperSpec Spectrometers George Che, Charles Bradford, Sean Bryan, Steven Hailey-Dunsheath, Philip Mauskopf, Corwin Shiu SuperSpec is an on-chip, millimeter-wave, astronomical spectrometer designed to provide the requisite bandwidth, sensitivity, and compactness to perform the next generation of spectroscopic observations, which promise to significantly deepen our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution in the early universe. Instead of a traditional diffraction grating, SuperSpec employs a series of lithographically-patterned spectral channels (SCs) implemented as narrow-band resonant filters coupled to kinetic inductance detectors. Ongoing measurements of prototype spectrometers imply complex interactions between neighboring channels, behavior that cannot be captured by the simple single-channel model that informed current designs. In order to fully characterize the electromagnetics of our devices and guide future work, we have developed a Python-based full-circuit model, which assembles a full filter bank from its constituent SCs and transmission lines, taking into account all internal reflections. Fitting model spectra to measured spectra will explain the discrepancy between design and measured values for our three design parameters for each SC: resonant frequency, coupling quality factor, and internal quality factor. [Preview Abstract] |
Follow Us |
Engage
Become an APS Member |
My APS
Renew Membership |
Information for |
About APSThe American Physical Society (APS) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics. |
© 2024 American Physical Society
| All rights reserved | Terms of Use
| Contact Us
Headquarters
1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3844
(301) 209-3200
Editorial Office
100 Motor Pkwy, Suite 110, Hauppauge, NY 11788
(631) 591-4000
Office of Public Affairs
529 14th St NW, Suite 1050, Washington, D.C. 20045-2001
(202) 662-8700