학술논문
FIREBall-2: flight preparation of a proven balloon payload to image the intermediate redshift circumgalactic medium
Document Type
Working Paper
Author
Picouet, Vincent; Valls-Gabaud, David; Milliard, Bruno; Schiminovich, David; Miles, Drew M.; Hoadley, Keri; Hamden, Erika; Martin, D. Christopher; Kyne, Gillian; Brendel, Trent; Khan, Aafaque Raza; Evrard, Jean; Lin, Zeren; Chung, Haeun; Agarwal, Simran; Aleman, Ignacio Cevallos; Chevrier, Charles-Antoine; Li, Jess; Melso, Nicole; Nikzad, Shouleh; Vibert, Didier; Bray, Nicolas
Source
Subject
Language
Abstract
FIREBall-2 is a stratospheric balloon-borne 1-m telescope coupled to a UV multi-object slit spectrograph designed to map the faint UV emission surrounding z~0.7 galaxies and quasars through their Lyman-alpha line emission. This spectro-imager had its first launch on September 22nd 2018 out of Ft. Sumner, NM, USA. Because the balloon was punctured, the flight was abruptly interrupted. Instead of the nominal 8 hours above 32 km altitude, the instrument could only perform science acquisition for 45 minutes at this altitude. In addition, the shape of the deflated balloon, combined with a full Moon, revealed a severe off-axis scattered light path, directly into the UV science detector and about 100 times larger than expected. In preparation for the next flight, and in addition to describing FIREBall-2's upgrade, this paper discusses the exposure time calculator (ETC) that has been designed to analyze the instrument's optimal performance (explore the instrument's limitations and subtle trade-offs).