Paper 13093-106
FIREBall-2 2023: fine guidance system performance for UV balloon telescope flight
17 June 2024 • 17:30 - 19:00 Japan Standard Time | Room G5, North - 1F
Abstract
FIREBall-2 is a Balloon-Borne UV telescope designed to observe faint UV emission from the circumgalactic medium around low redshift galaxies (z ~ 0.3 - 1.0). FIREBall-2 employs a 1m telescope with a multi-object spectrograph, custom-designed slit-masks and a delta-doped EMCCD detector. FIREBall-2 achieves steady 1-2” pointing with a CNES-provided coarse guidance system complemented by a fine guidance system which provides real time, on-sky feedback with an sCMOS camera embedded within the spectrograph enclosure. The guider system provides a live video stream, computes translational and rotational offsets and sends high rate (30 Hz) gondola pointing error corrections, while also handling slit mask selection and in-flight optimization of the image focus and PSF. We review the current state of the system after testing and use during FIREBall-2’s 2018 and 2023 campaigns and discuss its performance, challenges and development of its hardware and software functions ahead of its next flight campaign.
Presenter
Ignacio Cevallos-Aleman
Columbia Univ. (United States)
Ignacio Cevallos-Aleman is a PhD candidate in Physics at Columbia University. His research focuses on astronomical instrumentation tailored towards emission line studies of the Circumgalactic Medium. He works on the ground-based Circumgalactic H-alpha Spectrograph CHaS and the FIREBall-2 Balloon Telescope.