Ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopy is one of the most powerful tools used in a wide range of scientific fields from planetary science to astronomy. We propose a future UV space telescope, LAPYUTA (Life-environmentology, Astronomy, and PlanetarY Ultraviolet Telescope Assembly), selected as a candidate for JAXA’s 6th M-class mission in 2023. Launch is planned for the early 2030s. LAPYUTA will accomplish the following four objectives related to two scientific goals: understanding (1) the habitable environment and (2) the origin of structure and matter in the universe. Objective 1 focuses on the subsurface ocean environments of Jupiter's icy moons and the atmospheric evolution of terrestrial planets. Objective 2 characterizes the atmosphere of the exoplanets around the habitable zone and estimates their surface environment by detecting their exospheric atmosphere. In cosmology and astronomy, Objective 3 tests whether the structures of presentday galaxies contain ubiquitous Ly-α halos and reveals the physical origins of Ly-α halos. Objective 4 elucidates the synthesis process of heavy elements based on observations of ultraviolet radiation from hot gas immediately after neutronstar mergers. LAPYUTA will perform spectroscopic and imaging observations in the far-UV range of 110-190 nm with an effective area of >300 cm2 and a high spatial resolution of 0.1 arcsec. The apogee is 2,000 km, and the perigee is 1,000 km to avoid the influence of the geocorona when observing oxygen and hydrogen atoms and the Earth's radiation belt.
A micro-satellite for wide-field near-UV transient exploration PETREL is presented. The scientific goal is to detect transient sources, such as GW sources accompanied by EM emission, supernovae, and other unknown phenomena in the UV sky, and to reveal the nature of explosive phenomena in the universe through multimessenger observations. PETREL is equipped with an 80 mm refractor coupled with BI-CMOS detector. A powerful OBC automatically processes the received data and searches for orbital transients. If a transient is detected, an alert is immediately sent over the Globalstar network. A 50 kg class micro-satellite bus system is being developed for this mission. A series of functional tests using simulators have verified that the satellite system can detect transient sources in nearby galaxies as designed.
In this paper, we present our approach regarding the compensation of defective pixels in the infrared array detector used in the NINJA spectrograph for the Subaru Telescope. While it is typical to use a detector with minimal defective pixels for infrared spectrographs, our HAWAII-2RG detector has a central area with a defective pixel rate of 10%. Therefore, we compensate for defective pixels by mechanically shifting the detector along the focal plane in the direction of dispersion. This approach applies the concept of dithering in imaging observation to a spectrograph, and the shifting mechanism is designed to have a maximum movement distance of 8 mm. We present the expected performance of the compensation and the actual mechanical structure fabricated.
Near-INfrared and optical Joint spectrograph with Adaptive optics (NINJA) is an optical to near-infrared (NIR) spectrograph optimized for the laser tomography adaptive optics (LTAO) system at the Subaru telescope, realized by the adaptive secondary mirror and four-laser guide star (LGS) system now under development. One of the primary science objectives of this spectrograph is wide-band spectroscopic follow-up of transient sources like GRB, supernovae, or gravitational wave sources down to 22 mag in the J -band. NINJA consists of two spectrograph units, one is in the optical (0.35-0.85 µm) and the other in the NIR (0.85-2.5 µm), and a fore-optics which splits the light from the telescope to the spectrographs and wavefront sensors (WFSs) of LTAO. Each spectrograph has a slit with 0.35′′ wide and 5′′ long, and a spectral resolution of R=3000-4000 utilizing a grating. The four LGSs are planned to be arranged on a circle around the slit with a radius of about 8′′, and a patrol field of view (FoV) of a tip-tilt guide star is about 2′ diameter. With two dichroic mirrors, the fore-optics splits the light of the FoV into three wavelength ranges of 0.35-0.85 µm, 0.85-2.5 µm, and 0.589 µm for LGS. In this paper, we report the overall system of NINJA and a conceptual design of the optics.
Tomo-e Gozen (Tomo-e) is a wide field optical camera for the Kiso 1.05 m f/3.1 Schmidt telescope operated by
the University of Tokyo. Tomo-e is equipped with 84 chips of front-illuminated CMOS image sensors with a
microlens array. The field of view is about 20 square degrees and maximum frame rate is 2 fps. The CMOS
sensor has 2160x1200 pixels and a size of pixel is 19 microns, which is larger than those of other CMOS sensors.
We have evaluated performances of the CMOS sensors installed in Tomo-e. The readout noise is 2.0 e- in 2 fps
operations when an internal amplifier gain is set to 16. The dark current is 0.5 e-/sec/pix at room temperature, 290K, which is lower than a typical sky background flux in Tomo-e observations, 50 e-/sec/pix. The efficiency
of the camera system peaks at approximately 0.7 in 500 nm.
The Tomo-e Gozen is a wide-field high-speed camera for the Kiso 1.0-m Schmidt telescope, with a field-of-view of 20.7-deg2 covered by 84 chips of 2k x 1k CMOS image sensors with 19-μm pixels. It is capable to take consecutive images at 2-fps in full-frame read with an absolute time accuracy of 0.2 millisecond. The sensors are operated without mechanical coolers owing to a low dark current at room temperature. A low read noise of 2-e- achieves higher sensitivity than that with a CCD sensor in short exposures. Big data of 30-TBytes per night produced in the 2-fps observations is processed in real-time to quickly detect transient events and issue alerts for follow-ups.
A conceptual design of a wide-field near UV transient survey in a 6U CubeSat is presented. Ultraviolet is one of the frontier in the transient astronomy. To open up the discovery region, we are developing a 6U CubeSat for transient exploration. The possible targets will be supernova shock-breakouts, tidal disruption events, and the blue emission from NS-NS mergers in very early phase. If we only focused on nearby/bright sources, the required detection limit is around 20 mag (AB). To avoid the background and optical light, we chose a waveband of 230-280 nm. As an imaging detector, we employ a delta-doped back-illuminated CMOS. In addition to delta doping, the multi-layer coating directly deposited on the detector enables both a high in-band UV QE and the ultra-low optical rejection ratio. Taking into account these specifications, even an 8 cm telescope can achieve the detection limit of 20 magAB. The expected FoV is larger than 60 deg2 .
The Tomo-e Gozen is an extremely wide-field optical camera for the Kiso 1.0-m Schmidt telescope. It is capable of taking consecutive frames with a field-of-view of 20 deg2 and a sub-second time-resolution, which are achieved by 84 chips of 2k×1k CMOS sensor. This camera adopts unconventional designs including a lightweight structure, a nonvacuumed and naturally-air cooled system, front-side-illuminated CMOS sensors with microlens arrays, a sensor alignment along a spherical focal plane of the telescope, and massive readout electronics. To develop technical components necessary for the Tomo-e Gozen and confirm a feasibility of its basic design, we have developed a prototype-model (PM) of the Tomo-e Gozen prior to the final-model (FM). The Tomo-e PM is equipped with eight chips of the CMOS sensor arranged in a line along the RA direction, covering a sky area of 2.0 deg2. The maximum frame rate is 2 fps. The total data production rate is 80 MByte sec-1 at 2 fps, corresponding to approximately 3 TByte night-1. After laboratory testing, we have successfully obtained consecutive movie data at 2 fps with the Tomo-e PM in the first commissioning run conducted in the end of 2015.
KEYWORDS: Phase modulation, Cameras, CMOS sensors, Data storage, Data processing, Computing systems, Signal detection, Observatories, Data acquisition, Astronomy
The Tomo-e Gozen camera is a next-generation, extremely wide field optical camera, equipped with 84 CMOS sensors. The camera records about a 20 square degree area at 2 Hz, providing “astronomical movie data”. We have developed a prototype of the Tomo-e Gozen camera (hereafter, Tomo-e PM), to evaluate the basic design of the Tomo-e Gozen camera. Tomo-e PM, equipped with 8 CMOS sensors, can capture a 2 square degree area at up to 2 Hz. Each CMOS sensor has about 2.6 M pixels. The data rate of Tomo-e PM is about 80 MB/s, corresponding to about 280 GB/hour. We have developed an operating system and reduction softwares to handle such a large amount of data. Tomo-e PM was mounted on 1.0-m Schmidt Telescope in Kiso Observatory at the University of Tokyo. Experimental observations were carried out in the winter of 2015 and the spring of 2016. The observations and software implementation were successfully completed. The data reduction is now in execution.
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