Here we discuss advances in UV technology over the last decade, with an emphasis on photon counting, low noise, high efficiency detectors in sub-orbital programs. We focus on the use of innovative UV detectors in a NASA astrophysics balloon telescope, FIREBall-2, which successfully flew in the Fall of 2018. The FIREBall-2 telescope is designed to make observations of distant galaxies to understand more about how they evolve by looking for diffuse hydrogen in the galactic halo. The payload utilizes a 1.0-meter class telescope with an ultraviolet multi-object spectrograph and is a joint collaboration between Caltech, JPL, LAM, CNES, Columbia, the University of Arizona, and NASA. The improved detector technology that was tested on FIREBall-2 can be applied to any UV mission. We discuss the results of the flight and detector performance. We will also discuss the utility of sub-orbital platforms (both balloon payloads and rockets) for testing new technologies and proof-of-concept scientific ideas
@article{arxiv.1905.00433,
title = {FIREBall-2: advancing TRL while doing proof-of-concept astrophysics on a suborbital platform},
author = {Erika T. Hamden and Keri Hoadley and D. Christopher Martin and David Schiminovich and Bruno Milliard and Shouleh Nikzad and Ramona Augustin and Philippe Balard and Patrick Blanchard and Nicolas Bray and Marty Crabill and Jean Evrard and Albert Gomes and Robert Grange and Julia Gross and April Jewell and Gillian Kyne and Michele Limon and Nicole Lingner and Mateusz Matuszewski and Nicole Melso and Frederi Mirc and Johan Montel and Hwei Ru Ong and Donal O'Sullivan and Sandrine Pascal and Etienne Perot and Vincent Picouet and Muriel Saccoccio and Brian Smiley and Xavier Soors and Pierre Tapie and Didier Vibert and Isabelle Zenone and Jose Zorilla},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.00433},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Submitted to the Proceedings of SPIE, Defense + Commercial Sensing (SI19)