Search

Superconducting Transition Edge Sensor (TES) bolometer arrays with thousands of pixels are essential for achieving the science objectives of future cold far-infrared astronomical telescopes. The readout of such large format TES arrays represents a significant challenge for these missions in terms of power consumption and thermal loading on the coldest cryogenic stages of the instruments. The Time Domain Multiplexing (TDM) technology is mature and has been implemented on many ground-based and air-borne instruments using TES arrays. Several concept studies such as Origins Space Telescope (OST [4]) or Mid-InfraRed Exo-planet CLimate Explorer (MIRECLE [5]) consider this technology and Time Domain Multiplexing as one of the possible baseline technologies for their instruments. In order to address the aforementioned challenges we propose a novel modular solution called Modular Adaptive Transition Edge Sensor Superconducting quantum interference device Electronics (MATESSE) that will serve as the necessary step towards an adaptation of the solution to a space-proven system.

The HIgh-Resolution Mid-infrarEd Spectrometer (HIRMES) is the 3rd Generation Instrument for the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). The HIRMES cryostat is comprised of several cooling stages (300K, 65K, 4K, 800mK, 400mK, and 70mK), which are essential to achieve the required sensitivity on the mid-infrared waveband in which HIRMES observes (25 um-122um). The science application of the HIRMES instrument is the study of proto-planetary systems that contain water-vapor, water-ice, deuterated hydrogen, and neutral oxygen. In this paper, we discuss the use of a He3 stage coupled to an Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator (ADR) stage in order to achieve the required temperature of 70mK on the Focal Plane Assembly (FPA). HIRMES' FPA contains two Transitioning Edge Sensor (TES) bolometric detector arrays that can provide a combination of four primary observing modes; High Resolution (R ~ 100,000), Mid-Resolution (R ~ 10,000), Low-Resolution (R ~ 600) spectroscopy, and Spectral Imaging (R ~ 2000).1 Moreover, we discuss the operations of the detector readout, in combination of a grating-dispersive spectroscopy mechanism, and a host of Fabry-Perot tunable narrow-band filters to achieve HIRMES' unmatched sensitivity in all four modes.

BETTII (Balloon Experimental Twin Telescope for Infra-red Interferometry) is designed to provide high angular resolution spectroscopic data in the far-infrared (FIR) wavelengths. The most significant limitation for BETTII is its sensitivity; obtaining spectral signal-to-noise ratio greater than 5 in less than 10 minutes requires sources greater than 13 Janskys (Jy). One possible way to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for future BETTII flights is by reducing the spectral bandwidth post beam-combination. This involves using a dispersive element to spread out a polychromatic point source PSF (Point Spread Function) on the detector array, such that each pixel corresponds to a small fraction of the bandwidth. This results in a broader envelope of the interferometric fringe pattern allowing more fringes to be detected, and thereby improving the spectral SNR. Here we present the analysis and optical design of the dispersive backend, discussing the tradeoffs and how it can be combined with the existing design.

The Primordial Inflation Explorer (PIXIE) is an Explorer-class mission concept to measure the gravitational-wavesignature of primordial inflation through its distinctive imprint on the linear polarization of the cosmic microwavebackground. Its optical system couples a polarizing Fourier transform spectrometer to the sky to measure thedifferential signal between orthogonal linear polarization states from two co-pointed beams on the sky. Thedouble differential nature of the four-port measurement mitigates beam-related systematic errors common to thetwo-port systems used in most CMB measurements. We describe the polarized beam patterns for PIXIE andassess the systematic error for measurements of CMB polarization.

The Balloon Experimental Twin Telescope for Infrared Interferometry (BETTII) is an 8-meter baseline far-infrared interferometer designed to fly on a high altitude balloon. BETTII uses a double-Fourier Michelson interferometer to simultaneously obtain spatial and spectral information on science targets; the long baseline provides subarcsecond angular resolution, a capability unmatched by any other far-infrared facilities. BETTII had its first successful engineering flight in June 2017. The pointing loop on BETTII is based on an Extended Kalman Filter, which uses different sensors and actuators to keep the telescope pointed at the desired target star. In order to achieve high precision pointing, we use an embedded Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that combines the gyroscope and star cameras information to generate a pointing solution every 10 milliseconds. The BETTII control system serves a critical function in making interferometric observations possible. This paper discusses the design and implementation of the BETTII control system and presents engineering data of the attitude control system from our pre-flight tests at the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) and data from our first 12-hour flight from Palestine, TX. This includes pointing performance of the Kalman Filter estimator in the RA, DEC and ROLL Equatorial Coordinate System as well as the payload’s attitude behavior when switching between the different modes we implemented: Safe, Brake, Slew, Track and Acquire. These modes are part of the procedure to point the telescope to a desired target. We discuss the performance of the payload’s control system in each of these modes and present data showing how the azimuth actuators follow the position and velocity profiles calculated by the flight computers.

The Balloon Experimental Twin Telescope for Infrared Interferometry (BETTII) mission launched from Palestine, Texas in June 2017. After an exciting launch and successful cruise, the BETTII gondola suffered an anomalous event at termination. BETTII separated from its parachute and free-fell 136,000 feet into the west Texas desert. This event was classified as a "close-call" and investigated as such. We present here the recovery effort required to find the payload and extract the payload from its impact site. We also present lessons learned from the event and results from the investigation, the design for the next BETTII gondola, and a path forward for return to flight.

The Balloon Experimental Twin Telescope for Infrared Interferometry (BETTII) is an 8-meter far-infrared (30-100 μm) double-Fourier Michelson interferometer designed to fly on a high altitude scientific balloon. The project began in 2011, and the payload was declared ready for flight in September 2016. Due to bad weather, the first flight was postponed until June 2017; BETTII was successfully launched on June 8, 2017 for an engineering flight. Over the course of the one night flight, BETTII acquired a large amount of technical data that we are using to characterize the payload. Unfortunately, the flight ended with an anomaly that resulted in destruction of the payload. In this paper, we will discuss the path to BETTII flight, the results of the first flight, and some of the plans for the future.

The Space High Angular Resolution Probe for the Infrared (SHARP-IR) is a new mission currently under study. As part of the preparation for the Decadal Survey, NASA is currently undertaking studies of four major missions, but interest has also been shown in determining if there are feasible sub-$1B missions that could provide significant scientific return. SHARP-IR is being designed as one such potential probe. In this talk, we will discuss some of the potential scientific questions that could be addressed with the mission, the current design, and the path forward to concept maturation.

The Primordial Ination Explorer (PIXIE) uses a nulling Fourier Transform Spectrometer to measure the absoluteintensity and linear polarization of the cosmic microwave background and diuse astrophysical foregrounds.PIXIE will search for the signature of primordial ination and will characterize distortions from a blackbodyspectrum, both to precision of a few parts per billion. Rigorous control of potential instrumental eects isrequired to take advantage of the raw sensitivity. PIXIE employs a highly symmetric design using multipledierential nulling to reduce the instrumental signature to negligible levels. We discuss the systematic errorbudget and mitigation strategies for the PIXIE mission.

We propose an architecture for the control system of BETTII, 1 a far-infrared, balloon-borne interferometer with a baseline of 8 meters. This system involves multiple synchronized control loops for real-time pointing control and precise attitude knowledge. This will enable accurate phase estimation and control, a necessity for successful interferometry. We present the overall control strategy and describe our flight hardware in detail. We also show our current test setup and the first results of our coarse pointing loop.

The Primordial Inflation Explorer is an Explorer-class mission to measure the gravity-wave signature of primordial inflation through its distinctive imprint on the linear polarization of the cosmic microwave background. PIXIE uses an innovative optical design to achieve background-limited sensitivity in 400 spectral channels spanning 2.5 decades in frequency from 30 GHz to 6 THz (1 cm to 50 micron wavelength). Multi-moded non-imaging optics feed a polarizing Fourier Transform Spectrometer to produce a set of interference fringes, proportional to the difference spectrum between orthogonal linear polarizations from the two input beams. The differential design and multiple signal modulations spanning 11 orders of magnitude in time combine to reduce the instrumental signature and confusion from unpolarized sources to negligible levels. PIXIE will map the full sky in Stokes I, Q, and U parameters with angular resolution 2.6 deg and sensitivity 0.2 uK per 1 deg square pixel. The principal science goal is the detection and characterization of linear polarization from an inflationary epoch in the early universe, with tensor-to-scalar ratio r

Here we present the optical and limited cryogenic design for The Balloon Experimental Twin Telescope for Infrared Interferometry (BETTII), an 8-meter far-infrared interferometer designed to fly on a high-altitude scientific balloon. The optical design is separated into warm and cold optics with the cold optics further separated into the far-infrared (FIR) (30-90 microns) and near-infrared (NIR) (1-3 microns). The warm optics are comprised of the twin siderostats, twin telescopes, K-mirror, and warm delay line. The cold optics are comprised of the cold delay line and the transfer optics to the FIR science detector array and the NIR steering array. The field of view of the interferometer is 2’, with a wavelength range of 30-90 microns, 0.5” spectral resolution at 40 microns, R~200 spectral resolution, and 1.5” pointing stability. We also present the design of the cryogenic system necessary for operation of the NIR and FIR detectors. The cryogenic system consists of a ‘Buffered He-7’ type cryogenic cooler providing a cold stage base temperature of < 280mK and 10 micro-Watts of heat lift and a custom in-house designed dewar that nominally provides sufficient hold time for the duration of the BETTII flight (24 hours).

The Balloon Experimental Twin Telescope for Infrared Interferometry (BETTII) is an 8-meter baseline far-infrared interferometer designed to fly on a high altitude balloon. BETTII uses a double-Fourier Michelson interferometer to simultaneously obtain spatial and spectral information on science targets; the long baseline permits subarcsecond angular resolution, a capability unmatched by other far-infrared facilities. This program started in 2011, and is now in the process of building and testing components of the mission, aiming for first flight in fall of 2015. This paper will provide an overview of the BETTII experiment, with a discussion of current progress and of future plans.

The Primordial Inflation Explorer (PIXIE) is an Explorer-class mission to characterize the cosmic microwave background (CMB). PIXIE will map linear polarization on degree angular scales and larger to search for the gravity-wave signature of primordial inflation, and measure distortions from the blackbody spectrum to constrain energy-releasing processes in the early universe. PIXIE uses multi-moded optics to achieve sensitivity comparable to a kilo-pixel focal plane of diffraction-limited detectors, but using only 4 semiconductor bolometers illuminated by a non-imaging feed horn. PIXIE's frequency coverage extends from 30 GHz to 6 THz. Although the co- and cross-polar response of the feed horn and coupling optics is easily evaluated in the short-wavelength (geometric optics) limit, the response at longer wavelengths is more difficult to model analytically. We have built a coupled feed horn/reflector optical system based on the PIXIE design and measured the co- and cross-polar response at several wavelengths spanning the transition from the few-mode limit at long wavelengths to the geometric optics limit at short wavelengths. We compare the measured co- and cross-polar beam patterns to model predictions and discuss the implications for the PIXIE mission and similar missions using multi-moded optics.

The Balloon Experimental Twin Telescope for Infrared Interferometry (BETTII) is an 8-meter baseline far-infrared interferometer to fly on a high altitude balloon. Operating at wavelengths of 30-90 microns, BETTII will obtain spatial and spectral information on science targets at angular resolutions down to less than half an arcsecond, a capability unmatched by other far-infrared facilities. This requires attitude control at a level ofless than a tenth of an arcsecond, a great challenge for a lightweight balloon-borne system. We have designed a precision attitude determination system to provide gondola attitude knowledge at a level of 2 milliarcseconds at rates up to 100Hz, with accurate absolute attitude determination at the half arcsecond level at rates of up to 10Hz. A mUlti-stage control system involving rigid body motion and tip-tilt-piston correction provides precision pointing stability to the level required for the far-infrared instrument to perform its spatial/spectral interferometry in an open-loop control. We present key aspects of the design of the attitude determination and control and its development status.

The Goddard-IRAM Superconducting 2 Millimeter Observer (GISMO) is an 8xl6 Transition Edge Sensor (TES) array of bolometers built as a pathfinder for TES detector development efforts at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. GISMO has been used annually at the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimetrique (IRAM) 30 meter telescope since 2007 under engineering time and was opened in the spring of 2012 to the general astronomical community. The spring deployment provided an opportunity to modify elements of the room temperature optics before moving the instrument to its new permanent position in the telescope receiver cabin. This allowed for the possibility to extend the cryostat, introduce improved cold baffling and thus further optimize the stray light performance for final astronomical use of the instrument, which has been completed and validated. We will demonstrate and discuss several of the methods used to quantify and limit the influence of stray light in the GISMO camera.

We present the concept for the GISMO-2 bolometer camera) which we build for background-limited operation at the IRAM 30 m telescope on Pico Veleta, Spain. GISM0-2 will operate Simultaneously in the 1 mm and 2 mm atmospherical windows. The 1 mm channel uses a 32 x 40 TES-based Backshort Under Grid (BUG) bolometer array, the 2 mm channel operates with a 16 x 16 BUG array. The camera utilizes almost the entire full field of view provided by the telescope. The optical design of GISM0-2 was strongly influenced by our experience with the GISMO 2 mm bolometer camera which is successfully operating at the 30m telescope. GISMO is accessible to the astronomical community through the regular IRAM call for proposals.

The Balloon Experimental Twin Telescope for Infrared Interferometry (BETTII) is an 8-meter baseline far-infraredinterferometer designed to fly on a high altitude balloon. BETTII uses a double-Fourier Michelson interferometer tosimultaneously obtain spatial and spectral information on science targets; the long baseline permits subarcsecond angular resolution, a capability unmatched by other far-infrared facilities. Here, we present key aspects of the overall design of the mission and provide an overview of the current status of the project. We also discuss briefly the implications of this experiment for future space-based far-infrared interferometers.

We present the design of a fringe tracking system for the Balloon Experimental Twin Telescope for Infrared Interferometry (BETTII). BETTII is a balloon- borne, far-infrared, 8 m-baseline interferometer with two 50 cm siderostats. Beams from the two arms are combined in the pupil plane to enable double-Fourier, spatio-spectral interferometry. To maintain the phase stability of the system, we need to actively correct of the optical path difference (OPD) between the two arms. The fringe-tracking system will work in the near-infrared and will use a reference star within the field of view to achieve two goals: overlap the beams coming from the two siderostats, and track the location of the central fringe packet, which is a measure of the OPD. The fringe tracker will share most of the optical train with the science instrument. This system is part of the overall control architecture that feeds fast steering tip/ tilt mirrors and a warm delay line to ensure proper beam combination and OPD control for the science instrument. This paper investigates the different sources of perturbations that are expected at float altitude, and derives the sensitivity of the fringe-tracking system. We show progress on validating our design using a visible light, broadband Mach-Zehnder interferometer that was developed at NASA/GSFC. This system demonstrates the viability of our OPD determination approach and provides a means of testing and characterizing several OPD determination and control algorithms.

We describe a mission architecture designed to substantially increase the science capability of the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Astrophysics Explorer Program for all AO proposers working within the near-UV to far-infrared spectrum. We have demonstrated that augmentation of Falcon 9 Explorer launch services with a 13 kW Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) stage can deliver a 700 kg science observatory payload to extra-Zodiacal orbit. This new capability enables up to ~13X increased photometric sensitivity and ~160X increased observing speed relative to a Sun-Earth L2, Earth-trailing, or Earth orbit with no increase in telescope aperture. All enabling SEP stage technologies for this launch service augmentation have reached sufficient readiness (TRL-6) for Explorer Program application in conjunction with the Falcon 9. We demonstrate that enabling Astrophysics Explorers to reach extra-zodiacal orbit will allow this small payload program to rival the science performance of much larger long development time systems; thus, providing a means to realize major science objectives while increasing the SMD Astrophysics portfolio diversity and resiliency to external budget pressure. The SEP technology employed in this study has strong applicability to SMD Planetary Science community-proposed missions. SEP is a stated flight demonstration priority for NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT). This new mission architecture for astrophysics Explorers enables an attractive realization of joint goals for OCT and SMD with wide applicability across SMD science disciplines., Submitted to proceedings of the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 2012

Keywords: GISMO, Optical Design, High-throughput, Detector System, IRAMThe Goddard IRAM Superconducting Millimeter Observer (GISMO) is a new superconducting bolometer array camerafor the IRAM 30 Meter Telescope on Pico Veleta, Spain. GISMO uses a 3He/4He cooler mounted to a liquid He/LN2cryostat to cool the bolometer array and SQUID electronics to an operating temperature of 260mK. The bolometer arrayis based on the backshort-under-grid architecture and features 128 2mm square absorbing pixels. A 101mm diameteranti-reflection coated silicon lens is used to define the beam. A single cold pupil stop prevents warm radiation fromreaching the array, but no other stops are used. In the beam, filters and a cold baffling and stray light suppression systemwere used to define the bandpass and prevent out-of-band radiation to a very high level, including out-of-band radiationleaking through the metal-mesh filters from extreme angles. We present a detailed description of this optical design andits performance. A comprehensive report of the electronics and cryogenic integration are also included.

The Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) is one of three focal plane instruments on board the Spitzer Space Telescope. IRAC is a four-channel camera that obtains simultaneous broad-band images at 3.6, 4.5, 5.8, and 8.0 microns in two nearly adjacent fields of view. We summarize here the in-flight scientific, technical, and operational performance of IRAC., 16 pages, presented at the Glasgow SPIE conference "Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Space Telescopes", to appear in Proc. SPIE, vol. 5487. Higher resolution version available at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/irac/publications/

The SPEED camera is being developed to study the spectral energy distributions of high redshift galaxies, Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect in X-ray clusters and other cold objects in the universe. Its initial runs will be done on the 10 m Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope (HHSMT), with later runs using the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT). SPEED requires a 2x2 pixel cryogenic detector array of Frequency Selective Bolometers (FSB). Each of the pixels will have four frequency bands in the ~150-350 GHz range. Here we describe the development of the detector array of these high efficiency FSBs. The FSB design provides the multi-pixel multi-spectral band capability required for SPEED in a compact, light weight, stackable array. The SPEED FSB bolometers will use proximity effect superconducting transition edge sensors (TES) as their temperature-sensing element permitting significantly higher levels of electronic multiplexing in future applications where larger numbers of detectors may be required.

The TopHat instrument was designed to operate on the top of a high altitude balloon. From this location, the experiment could efficiently observe using a clean beam with extremely low contamination from the far side lobes of the instrument beam. The experiment was designed to scan a large portion of the sky directly above it and to map the anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and thermal emission from galactic dust. The instrument used a one-meter class telescope with a five-band single pixel radiometer spanning the frequency range from 150-600 GHz. The radiometer used bolometric detectors operating at ~250mK. Here, we report on the flight of the TopHat experiment over Antarctica in January, 2001 and describe the scientific goals, the operation, and in-flight performance.

" # $ %# ! & ' ( ! )*))+ % && & ! , $ % , ! ! $ !& % & - ' %# ! & & - % - , $ % %# & ( $ !& - %