Conference proceeding
The FIREBall-2 UV balloon telescope: 2018 flight and improvments for 2020
UV, X-RAY, AND GAMMA-RAY SPACE INSTRUMENTATION FOR ASTRONOMY XXI, Vol.11118
Proceedings of SPIE
01/01/2019
DOI: 10.1117/12.2530047
Abstract
The Faint Intergalactic-medium Redshifted Emission Balloon (FIREBall-2, FB-2) is designed to discover and map faint UV emission from the circumgalactic medium around low redshift galaxies (z similar to 0.3 (C IV); z similar to 0.7 (Lyff); z similar to 1.0 (O VI)). FIREBall-2's first launch, on September 22nd 2018 out of Ft. Sumner, NM, was abruptly cut short due to a hole that developed in the balloon. FIREBall-2 was unable to observe above its minimum require altitude (25 km; nominal: 32 km) for its shortest required time (2 hours; nominal: 8+ hours). The shape of the deflated balloon, as well as a concurrent full moon close to our observed target field, revealed a severe, off-axis scattered light path directly to the UV science detector.
Additional damage to FB-2 added complications to the ongoing effort to prepare FB-2 for a quick re-floght. Upon landing, several mirrors in the optical chain, including the two large telescope mirrors, were damaged, resulting in chunks of material broken off the sides and reflecting surfaces. The magnifying optical element, called the focal corrector, was discovered to be misaligned beyond tolerance after the 2018 flight, with one of its two mirrors damaged from the landing impact. We describe the steps taken thus far to mitigate the damage to the optics, as well as procedures and results from the ongoing efforts to re-align the focal corrector and spectrograph optics. We report the throughput of the spectrograph before and after the 2018 flight and plans for improving it. Finally, we describe several methods by which we address the scattered light issues seen from FIREBall-2's 2018 campaign and present the current status of FB-2 to fly during the summer campaign in Palestine, TX in 2020.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- The FIREBall-2 UV balloon telescope: 2018 flight and improvments for 2020
- Creators
- Keri Hoadley - California Institute of TechnologyErika T. Hamden - University of ArizonaBruno Milliard - Jet Propulsion LaboratoryAafaque R. Khan - University of ArizonaSimran Agarwal - University of ArizonaZeren Lin - California Institute of TechnologyDavid Schiminovich - Columbia UniversityGillian Kyne - California Institute of TechnologyJean Evrard - Centre National d'Études SpatialesD. Christopher Martin - California Institute of Technology
- Contributors
- O H Siegmund (Editor)
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Publication Details
- UV, X-RAY, AND GAMMA-RAY SPACE INSTRUMENTATION FOR ASTRONOMY XXI, Vol.11118
- Series
- Proceedings of SPIE
- DOI
- 10.1117/12.2530047
- ISSN
- 0277-786X
- eISSN
- 1996-756X
- Publisher
- Spie-Int Soc Optical Engineering
- Number of pages
- 14
- Grant note
- David & Ellen Lee Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship in Experimental Physics at Caltech Balloon Program Office (BPO/NASA) Columbia Scientific Ballooning Facility (CSBF) APRA program for sub-orbital missions CNRS; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) CNES; Centre National D'etudes Spatiales
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/01/2019
- Academic Unit
- Physics and Astronomy
- Record Identifier
- 9984428825602771
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