English

In orbit performance of UVIT over the 5 years

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2022-04-20 v1

Abstract

Over the last 5 years, UVIT has completed observations of more than 500 proposals with ~ 800 unique pointings. In addition, regular planned monitoring observations have been made and from their analysis various key parameters related to in orbit performance of UVIT have been quantified. The sensitivities of the UV channels have remained steady indicating no effect of potential molecular contamination confirming the adequacy of all the protocols implemented for avoiding contamination. The quality of the PSF through the years confirms adequacy of thermal control measures. The early calibrations obtained during the Performance Verification (PV) phase have been further revised for more subtle effects. These include flat fields and detector distortions with greater precision. The operations of UVIT have also evolved through in orbit experience, e.g. tweaking of operational sequencing, protocol for recovery from bright object detection (BOD) shutdowns, parameters for BOD thresholds, etc. Finally, some effects of charged particle hits on electronics led to opimised strategy for regular resetting. The Near-UV channel was lost in one of such operations. All the above in-orbit experiences are presented here.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.13525,
  title  = {In orbit performance of UVIT over the 5 years},
  author = {S. K. Ghosh and P. Joseph and A. Kumar and J. Postma and C. S. Stalin and A. Subramaniam and S. N. Tandon and I. V. Barve and A. Devaraj and K. George and V. Girish and J. B. Hutchings and P. U. Kamath and S. Kathiravan and J. P. Lancelot and D. Leahy and P. K. Mahesh and R. Mohan and S. Nagabhushana and A. K. Pati and N. Kameswara Rao and K. Sankarasubramanian and P. Sreekumar and S. Sriram},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.13525},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in Journal of Astrophysics & Astronomy, 11 pages, 10 figures, 1 table