Toward a large telescope facility for submm/FIR astronomy at Dome C

Gilles Alphonse Durand; Vincent Minier; Pierre-Olivier Lagage; Emanuele Daddi; Samir El Khouloudi; Nicola Schneider-Bontemps; Michel Talvard; Christian Veyssière; Christian Walter; Lucia Sabbatini; Zalpha Challita; John W. V. Storey; Paolo Calisse; Alain Pierre; Maurizio Busso

doi:10.1117/12.789337

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10 July 2008 Toward a large telescope facility for submm/FIR astronomy at Dome C

Gilles Alphonse Durand, Vincent Minier, Pierre-Olivier Lagage, Emanuele Daddi, Samir El Khouloudi, Nicola Schneider-Bontemps, Michel Talvard, Christian Veyssière, Christian Walter, Lucia Sabbatini, Zalpha Challita, John W. V. Storey, Paolo Calisse, Alain Pierre, Maurizio Busso

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Proceedings Volume 7012, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes II; 70122B (2008) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.789337
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2008, Marseille, France

Abstract

Submillimetre astronomy is the prime technique to unveil the birth and early evolution of stars and galaxies in the local and distant Universe. Preliminary meteorological studies and atmospheric transmission models tend to demonstrate that Dome C might offer atmosphere conditions that open the 200-μm atmospheric windows, and could potentially be a site for a large ground-based telescope facility. However, Antarctic climate conditions might also severely impact and deform any telescope mirror and hardware. We present prerequisite conditions and their associate experiments for defining a large telescope facility for submillimetre astronomy at Dome C: (1) Whether the submm/THz atmospheric windows open from 200 μm during a large and stable fraction of time; (2) The knowledge of thermal gradient and (3) icing formation and their impact on a telescope mirror and hardware. This paper will present preliminary results on current experiments that measure icing, thermal gradient and sky opacity at Dome C. We finally discuss a possible roadmap toward the deployment of a large telescope facility at Dome C.

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Gilles Alphonse Durand, Vincent Minier, Pierre-Olivier Lagage, Emanuele Daddi, Samir El Khouloudi, Nicola Schneider-Bontemps, Michel Talvard, Christian Veyssière, Christian Walter, Lucia Sabbatini, Zalpha Challita, John W. V. Storey, Paolo Calisse, Alain Pierre, and Maurizio Busso "Toward a large telescope facility for submm/FIR astronomy at Dome C", Proc. SPIE 7012, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes II, 70122B (10 July 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.789337

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