Status of the STUDIO UV balloon mission and platform
Abstract
Stratospheric balloons offer accessible and affordable platforms for observations in atmosphere-constrained wavelength ranges. At the same time, they can serve as an effective step for technology demonstration towards future space applications of instruments and other hardware. The Stratospheric UV Demonstrator of an Imaging Observatory (STUDIO) is a balloon-borne platform and mission carrying an imaging micro-channel plate (MCP) detector on a 0.5 m aperture telescope. STUDIO is currently planned to fly during the summer turnaround conditions over Esrange, Sweden, in the 2022 season. For details on the ultraviolet (UV) detector, see the contribution of Conti et al. to this symposium. The scientific goal of the mission is to survey for variable hot compact stars and flaring M-dwarf stars within the galactic plane. At the same time, the mission acts as a demonstrator for a versatile and scalable astronomical balloon platform as well as for the aforementioned MCP instrument. The gondola is designed to allow the use of different instruments or telescopes. Furthermore, it is designed to serve for several, also longer, flights, which are envisioned under the European Stratospheric Balloon Observatory (ESBO) initiative. In this paper, we present the design and current status of manufacturing and testing of the STUDIO platform. We furthermore present the current plans for the flight and observations from Esrange.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2012.14215,
title = {Status of the STUDIO UV balloon mission and platform},
author = {A. Pahler and M. Ångermann and J. Barnstedt and S. Bougueroua and A. Colin and L. Conti and S. Diebold and R. Duffard and M. Emberger and L. Hanke and C. Kalkuhl and N. Kappelmann and T. Keilig and S. Klinkner and A. Krabbe and O. Janson and M. Lengowski and C. Lockowandt and P. Maier and T. Müller and T. Rauch and T. Schanz and B. Stelzer and M. Taheran and A. Vaerneus and K. Werner and J. Wolf},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.14215},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Proc. SPIE Conf., Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, 14-18 December 2020