SuperBIT was a 0.5-meter near-ultraviolet to near-infrared wide-field telescope that launched on a NASA superpressure balloon into the stratosphere from New Zealand for a 45-night flight. SuperBIT acquired multi-band images of galaxy clusters to study the properties of dark matter using weak gravitational lensing. We provide an overview of the instrument and its various subsystems. We then present the instrument performance from the flight, including the telescope and image stabilization system, the optical system, the power system, and the thermal system. SuperBIT successfully met the instrument's technical requirements, achieving a telescope pointing stability of 0.34 +/- 0.10 arcseconds, a focal plane image stability of 0.055 +/- 0.027 arcseconds, and a PSF FWHM of ~ 0.35 arcseconds over 5-minute exposures throughout the 45-night flight. The telescope achieved a near-diffraction limited point-spread function in all three science bands (u, b, and g). SuperBIT served as a pathfinder to the GigaBIT observatory, which will be a 1.34-meter near-ultraviolet to near-infrared balloon-borne telescope.
@article{arxiv.2408.01847,
title = {SuperBIT Superpressure Flight Instrument Overview and Performance: Near diffraction-limited Astronomical Imaging from the Stratosphere},
author = {Ajay S. Gill and Steven J. Benton and Christopher J. Damaren and Spencer W. Everett and Aurelien A. Fraisse and John W. Hartley and David Harvey and Bradley Holder and Eric M. Huff and Mathilde Jauzac and William C. Jones and David Lagattuta and Jason S. -Y. Leung and Lun Li and Thuy Vy T. Luu and Richard Massey and Jacqueline E. McCleary and Johanna M. Nagy and C. Barth Netterfield and Emaad Paracha and Susan F. Redmond and Jason D. Rhodes and Andrew Robertson and L. Javier Romualdez and Jürgen Schmoll and Mohamed M. Shaaban and Ellen L. Sirks and Georgios N. Vassilakis and André Z. Vitorelliand},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.01847},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
17 pages, 25 pages, published in the Astronomical Journal