Fabrication and calibration of FORTIS

Calibration and flight qualification of FORTIS

“…3 The original photocathode on the delivered detector had quantum efficiencies about half compared to previous measurements of CsI coated plates, such as those on the Hubble Space Telescope -Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). 7 Those QEs were remeasured approximately 9 months later and found to have decreased by an additional ∼50% from the original measurement.…”

“…3 The shutters are coated with thin strips of high permeability magnetic material to allow them to be partially opened by the close scanning (∼ 1.1 mm) of a quadrupole magnet. Electrodes are deposited on the surfaces so that magnetically actuated shutters may be electrostatically latched open by applying opposing polarity voltages to the shutter support grid.…”

“…We will show that with the exception of aberrations caused by a misfigured primary mirror, FORTIS achieved all the design goals presented in previous reports. 3,4 We will conclude with a presentation of the results of the first flight and a description of the new modifications being made to improve the instrument for future science flights.…”

“…2 A detailed description of the instrument design and early fabrication results was presented at the SPIE 2011 Optics and Photonics conference. 3 The first flight of the instrument occurred at 11:00pm on May 10, 2013 from the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico. The flight was an invaluable engineering effort, allowing a solid in-situ evaluation of our new spectro-telescope.…”

High etendue UV camera for simultaneous four-color imaging on a single detector

“…A 1.5 × 10 −3 cm 2 sr throughput scanning monochrometer design that produces 1-30 arcsec on-sky resolution, very narrow band (<1 nm) images [12] has broad spectral application, especially in the ultraviolet (UV). Similarly, a UV multi-object spectrograph making use of a microshutter array to select regions of a field of view [13] is the same concept that is envisioned for use in the infrared on the James Webb Space Telescope [14]. While both of these moving part designs and various other techniques may be used to image a scene over several bandpasses with arbitrary trades in throughput as well as spectral and spatial resolution, color selection though the use of filters is the method of choice for full field high throughput measurements.…”