The PLATO Dome A Site-Testing Observatory: Instrumentation and First Results

Yang, Huigen; Allen, G.; Ashley, M. C. B.; Bonner, C. S.; Bradley, Stuart; Cui, Xiangqun; Everett, Jon R.; Li, Feng; Gong, Xiaoli; Hengst, S.; Hu, Jinwen; Jiang, Zhaoji; Kulesa, Craig; Lawrence, Jon; Li, Y.; Luong-Van, D.; McCaughrean, M. J.; Moore, Anna; Pennypacker, C.; Qin, Weijian; Riddle, Reed; Shang, Zhaohui; Storey, J. W. V.; Sun, Bо; Suntzeff, Nicholas B.; Tothill, N.; Travouillon, Tony; Walker, Christopher K.; Wang, L.; Yan, Jun; Yang, Jukui; York, D. G.; Yuan, Xiangyan; Zhang, X.; Zhang, Z.; Zhou, Xu; Zhu, Z.

doi:10.1086/597547

Cited by 51 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The continued success of the PLATO observatory can be seen in the wealth of new scientific data and site-testing results that have started to emerge 3,10,13 . These types of observations require continued measurements over long time periods to provide accurate results for informed decisions on future instrumentation.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Performance of the autonomous PLATO Antarctic Observatory over two full years

et al. 2010

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For continuous observation at locations that are inhospitable for humans, the desirability of autonomous observatories is self evident. PLATO, the 'PLATeau Observatory' was designed to host an easily configurable instrument suite in the extremely cold conditions on the Antarctic plateau, and can provide up to 1 kW of power for the instruments. Powered by jet fuel and the Sun, PLATO and its instruments have been taking nearly uninterrupted astronomical science and sitetesting data at Dome A, the coldest, highest and driest location 1 on the Antarctic Plateau, since their deployment by the 24th Chinese expedition team in January 2008. At the time of writing, PLATO has delivered a total uptime of 730 days. Following a servicing mission by the 25th Chinese expedition team in 2008-9, PLATO has achieved 100% up-time (520 days) and has been in continuous contact with the rest of the world via its Iridium satellite modems. This paper discusses the performance of the observatory itself, assesses the sources of energy and dissects how the energy is divided between the core observatory functions of instrument power, heating, control and communication.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They will be turned off when the Sun rises. For a review of the instrument complement in PLATO refer to Yang et al (2009) 10 . …”

Section: Power Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performance of the autonomous PLATO Antarctic Observatory over two full years

et al. 2010

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The monthly variation due to the moon is noted in addition to the daily diurnal variation due to solar contribution. The dashed horizontal line indicates the approximate detector flux required for a B band sky brightness of 21.6 B magnitudes/arcsec 2 . Further in depth data reduction of the full dataset is required to confirm this minimum value.…”

Section: Sky Brightnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gattini 2010: cutting edge science at the bottom of the world

et al. 2010

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The high altitude Antarctic sites of Dome A and the South Pole offer intriguing locations for future large scale optical astronomical Observatories. The Gattini project was created to measure the optical sky brightness, large area cloud cover and aurora of the winter-time sky above such high altitude Antarctic sites. The Gattini-DomeA camera was installed on the PLATO instrument module as part of the Chinese-led traverse to the highest point on the Antarctic plateau in January 2008. This single automated wide field camera contains a suite of Bessel photometric filters (B, V, R) and a long-pass red filter for the detection and monitoring of OH emission. We have in hand one complete winter-time dataset (2009) from the camera that was recently returned in April 2010.The Gattini-South Pole UV camera is a wide-field optical camera that in 2011 will measure for the first time the UV properties of the winter-time sky above the South Pole dark sector. This unique dataset will consist of frequent images taken in both broadband U and B filters in addition to high resolution (R~5000) long slit spectroscopy over a narrow bandwidth of the central field. The camera is a proof of concept for the 2m-class Antarctic Cosmic Web Imager telescope, a dedicated experiment to directly detect and map the redshifted lyman alpha fluorescence or Cosmic Web emission we believe possible due to the unique geographical qualities of the site.We present the current status of both projects.

show abstract

“…The telescope tube is enclosed and the corrector window has an indium-tin-oxide coating to avoid frost formation. The telescope and instrument include a control system that interfaces to a remote PLATO system [7,8] for power generation, communications and control. *jl@aao.gov.au; phone +61 2 9372-4853…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The AST3-NIR camera for the Kunlun Infrared Sky Survey

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

AST3-NIR is a new infrared camera for deployment with the AST3-3 wide-field survey telescope to Dome A on the Antarctic plateau. This project is designed to take advantage of the low Antarctic infrared sky thermal background (particularly within the K dark near infrared atmospheric window at 2.4 μm) and the long Antarctic nights to provide high sensitivity temporal data from astronomical sources. The data collected from the Kunlun Infrared Sky Survey (KISS) will be used to conduct a range of astronomical science cases including the study of supernovae, exo-planets, variable stars, and the cosmic infrared background.

show abstract

The PLATO Dome A Site-Testing Observatory: Instrumentation and First Results

Cited by 51 publications

References 33 publications

Performance of the autonomous PLATO Antarctic Observatory over two full years

Performance of the autonomous PLATO Antarctic Observatory over two full years

Gattini 2010: cutting edge science at the bottom of the world

The AST3-NIR camera for the Kunlun Infrared Sky Survey

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About