The combination on large ground-based telescopes of extreme adaptive optics (ExAO), coronagraphy and high-dispersion spectroscopy is starting to emerge as a powerful technique for the direct characterisation of giant exoplanets. High spectral resolution not only brings a major gain in terms of accessible spectral features, but it also enables to better disentangle between the stellar and planetary signals thanks to the much higher spectral content. On-going projects such as KPIC for Keck, REACH for Subaru and HiRISE for the VLT base their observing strategy on the use of a few science fibres, one of which is dedicated to sampling the PSF of the planet, while the others sample the stellar residuals in the speckle field. The main challenge in this approach is to blindly centre the science fibre on the planet’s PSF, with typically a tolerance of less than one resolution element (0.1 λ/D). Several possible centring strategies can be adopted, either based on calibration fibres retro-injecting signal to mark the position of the science fibres or based on the use of focal-plane features introduced by the ExAO system. In this proceeding, we describe different possible approaches and we compare their centring accuracy using the MITHiC high-contrast imaging testbed. For this work, MITHiC has been upgraded to reproduce a setup close to the one that will be adopted in HiRISE, the coupling system that will soon be implemented between VLT/SPHERE and VLT/CRIRES+. Our results demonstrate that reaching a specification accuracy of 0.1 λ/D is extremely challenging regardless of the chosen centring strategy. It requires a high level of accuracy at every step of the centring procedure, which can be reached with very stable instruments. We studied the contributors to the centring error in the case of MITHiC and we quantified some of the most important terms.
CAGIRE is the near infrared camera of the Colibrí robotic telescope, designed for the follow-up of SVOM alerts, mainly Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs), and the quick imaging of sky regions where transient sources are detected by the SVOM satellite. CAGIRE is based on the Astronomical Large Format Array (ALFA) 2k x 2k SWIR sensor from the French consortium CEA-LYNRED. In the context of CAGIRE the sensor is operated in “Up the Ramp” mode to observe the sky in a square field of view of 21.7 arcmin on a side, in the range of wavelengths from 1.1 to 1.8 μm. An observation with CAGIRE consists of a series of short (1-2 minutes) exposures during which the pixels are read out every 1.3 second, continuously accumulating charges proportionally to the received flux, building a ramp.
The main challenge is to quickly process and analyse these ramps, in order to identify and study the near infrared counterparts of the bursts, within 5 minutes of the reception of an alert. Our preprocessing, which is under development, aims at providing reliable flux maps for the astronomy pipeline. It is based on a sequence of operations. First, calibration maps are used to identify saturated pixels, and for each pixel, the usable (non saturated) range of the ramp. Then, the ramps are corrected for the electronic common mode noise, and differential ramps are constructed. Finally, the flux is calculated from the differential ramps, using a previously calibrated map of pixel non-linearities. We present here the sequence of operations performed by the preprocessing, which are based on previous calibrations of the sensor response. These operations lead to the production of a flux map corrected from cosmic-rays hits, a map depicting the quality of the fit, a map of saturated pixels and a map of pixels hit by cosmic-rays, before the acquisition of the next ramp. These maps will be used by the astronomy pipeline to quickly extract the scientific results of the observations, like the identification of uncatalogued or quickly variable sources that could be GRB afterglows.
THESEUS mission aims to detect and observe transient sources in the X-ray and Gamma-Ray bands, with a follow-up in the infrared band. The primary objectives are to provide real time trigger and accurate location of GRBs and to discover new high-energy transients. THESEUS InfraRed Telescope (IRT) is, with the Soft X-ray Imager (SXI) and the X-Gamma ray Imaging Spectrometer (XGIS), one on the 3 instruments onboard THESEUS satellite. The IRT (0.7-1.8 μm) is a 0.7 m class IR telescope with 15x15 arcmin FOV, for fast response, with both imaging and spectroscopy capabilities. The most critical component for the spectroscopic mode is the grism. This grism is a complex component with multi - function properties: (i) fixing the line of sight towards the detector; (ii) selecting the correct spectral band with interferential filter; (iii) compensating for aberrations (both geometrical and chromatic) to reach near diffraction-limit image quality; (iiii) dispersing the wavelengths with a resolving power around 400. Such grisms have been developed by our laboratory for the NISP instrument of the EUCLID mission, with industry partnership from Silios Technologies. These grisms, with curved lines, are manufactured by photolithography. In the context of THESEUS IRT grisms, new R&D activities are mandatory to validate the manufacturability of the gratings since they have a groove density 3 times higher than NISP grisms. In this article, we will present the results we obtained on grating prototypes developed during the phase A of the project. Profilometric measurements of the groove profile and diffraction efficiency measurement are analyzed.
We present the design of the tools and equipment needed for mounting and dismounting the M1, M2, and M3 mirrors and DDRAGO/CAGIRE instrument of the Colibrí telescope at the observing room floor and from there to the ground level outside the building. Also, it includes the tool needed to balance the instruments that will be attach to Nasmyth stations and the ones needed to handle the mirrors in the vacuum chamber. Our designs confront the problem of handling these components in the very limited space available in the dome of a fast alt-az telescope.
MOSAIC is a multi-object spectrograph planned to be installed on the ESO-Extremely Large Telescope. The project is approved to start its phase B in September/October 2022. The main science cases addressed by MOSAIC go from the study of faint stars in the Milky Way and in the local group, to the study of dark matter, galaxy evolution and first-light objects at the epoch of reionisation. The MOSAIC instrument offers Multi-Object Spectroscopy and Integral Field Units capabilities from the visible (VIS) to the near-infrared (NIR). The Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille is responsible for the development of the near infrared spectrograph. More precisely, it is in charge of the global architecture and design of the NIR spectrograph (optical, mechanical, thermal) and the assembly, integration, tests and verification (AIT/V) activities in cryogenic environment. In this article, the main tradeoffs in terms of optical and mechanical architectures are analyzed; the main technical choices are justified according to the science requirements (from which technical requirement specifications are derived) and the level of maturity of key critical technologies. The NIR spectrograph will be described in terms of system engineering approach. The requirement flow-down strategy, from high-level requirements at the system level toward technical specifications at the module and component levels will be presented. The main interfaces and the development philosophy (with an emphasis on the AIT/V plan) will also be included.
The COLIBRÍ robotic observatory is being developed for observing the optical counterparts of GRBs detected by the SVOM satellite. It will be located at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional in San Pedro Mártir, México. The project is a collaboration between France and México. For this purpose the astronomical instrument DDRAGO is under the last phase of critical design and starting its construction. The structural design techniques applied for developing DDRAGO are described. The mechanical calculations and finite element analysis of the instrument are included and translated into their respective error budget.
MOSAIC, the multi-object spectrograph (MOS) for the ESO 39m European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), will combine visible and near-infrared observations with multi-object and multi-integral field spectroscopy capabilities. It will cover a wide panel of topics, from resolved stars up to the most distant galaxies. In the frame of the NIR spectrograph unit realization led by the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM), this paper presents the ongoing development of a cryogenic (90-130 K) NIR camera prototype tested in the 0.77-1.063 µm wavelengths (I band) detailing the opto-mechanical design and the integration and verification strategies in accordance with validation in relevant environment (ESO TRL5).
KEYWORDS: Sensors, Electronics, Control systems, Power supplies, Computing systems, Charge-coupled devices, Fluctuations and noise, Telescopes, Connectors, Camera shutters
When the SVOM mission is fully operational, data from the GRB and GW locations on the sky must be sent to ground stations to study their optical counterparts. Among these telescopes is COLIBRÍ, a Franco-Mexican robotic telescope. Its diameter is 1.3m and its focal length is f/7.2. It is mainly designed to observe the counterpart in the visible and near infrared. In this paper we describe the control system of DDRAGO, the imager component of COLIBRÍ.
We present the design of the DDRAGO wide-field multi-channel imager for the 1.3 meter COLIBRÍ telescope for the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional in Mexico. The instrument has blue and red channels which have fields of 26 arcmin. It also delivers a faster infrared beam to the CAGIRE imager which has a field of 22 arcmin. The instrument is designed to provide initial follow-up of GRBs detected by the ECLAIRs instrument on the SVOM satellite. DDRAGO is a descendent of the successful RATIR imager, but the optical design is significantly more complex to allow much wider fields. We summarize the optical, optomechanical, structural, and control design
MOSAIC is the Multi-Object Spectrograph for the ESO Extremely Large Telescope, approved to enter Phase B beginning 2022. It is conceived as a multi- purpose instrument covering the Visible and Near Infrared bandwidth (0.45 –1.8 μm) with two observing modes: spatially resolved spectroscopy with 8 integral field units; and the simultaneous observation of 200 objects in the VIS and NIR in unresolved spectroscopy.
We present an overview of the main MOSAIC science drivers and the actual baseline design for the instrument. The prototyping and developments undertaken by the consortium to evaluate the feasibility of the project are also discussed.
MOSAIC is the Muti-Object Spectrograph for the ESO Extremely Large Telescope. The Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) is in charge of the instrument “Assembly, Integration, Test and Verification (AIT/V)” phases. AITV for AO instruments, in laboratory as in the telescope, always represent numerous technical challenges. We already started the preparation and planning for the instrument level AIT activities, from identification of needs, challenges, risks, to defining the optimal AIT strategy. In this paper, we present the state of this study and describe several AIT/V scenarios and a planning for AIT phases in Europe and in Chile. We also show our capacity, experience and expertise to lead the instrument MOSAIC AIT/V activities.
This work describes the architectural design for the construction of the building for the COLIBRI robotic telescope, which has a 1.3 m primary mirror and forms part of the ground segment of the SVOM (Space Variable Object Monitor) mission dedicated to the detection and study of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The building is currently being installed. The building that will house the telescope will have a total height of 10 m including the dome. The center of the building will contain a concrete column with an independent foundation of the building of 2.5 m in diameter and 5.3 meter in height. In addition it will have 2 levels (floors) for the control room and observing room. In this article we share the progress achieved so far, which includes the design for the building structure, installations of the electrical, communication and network systems, air-conditioning systems, special considerations related to the environmental management of the operation site, and the start of construction. We also include the technological challenges and challenges addressed during the design process, in particular we will present our solutions to avoid heat leaks from the control room to the observing room and isolate the telescope from vibrations produced by the dome and the rest of the enclosure.
Cosmic explosions have emerged as a major field of astrophysics over the last years with our increasing capability to monitor large parts of the sky in different wavelengths and with different messengers (photons, neutrinos, and gravitational waves). In this context, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) play a very specific role, as they are the most energetic explosions in the Universe. The forthcoming Sino-French SVOM mission will make a major contribution to this scientific domain by improving our understanding of the GRB phenomenon and by allowing their use to understand the infancy of the Universe. In order to fulfill all of its scientific objectives, SVOM will be complemented by a fast robotic 1.3 m telescope, COLIBRI, with multiband photometric capabilities (from visible to infrared). This telescope is being jointly developed by France and Mexico. The telescope and one of its instruments are currently being extensively tested at OHP in France and will be installed in Mexico in spring 2023.
The Infra-Red Telescope (IRT) is part of the payload of the THESEUS mission, which is one of the two ESA M5 candidates within the Cosmic Vision program, planned for launch in 2032. The THESEUS payload, composed by two high energy wide field monitors (SXI and XGIS) and a near infra-red telescope (IRT), is optimized to detect, localize and characterize Gamma-Ray Bursts and other high-energy transients. The main goal of the IRT is to identify and precisely localize the NIR counterparts of the high-energy sources and to measure their distance. Here we present the design of the IRT and its expected performance.
We present an overview of the development of the end-to-end simulations programs developed for COLIBRI (Catching OpticaL and Infrared BRIght), a 1.3m robotic follow-up telescope of the forthcoming SVOM (Space Variable Object Monitor) mission dedicated to the detection and study of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The overview contains a description of the Exposure Time Calculator, Image Simulator and photometric redshift code developed in order to assess the performance of COLIBRI. They are open source Python packages and were developed to be easily adaptable to any optical/ Near-Infrared imaging telescopes. We present the scientific performances of COLIBRI, which allows detecting about 95% of the current GRB dataset. Based on a sample of 500 simulated GRBs, a new Bayesian photometric redshift code predicts a relative photometric redshift accuracy of about 5% from redshift 3 to 7.
COLIBRI is one of the two robotic ground follow-up telescopes for the SVOM (Space Variable Object Monitor) mission dedicated to the study of gamma-ray bursts, allowing determination of precise celestial coordinates of the detected bursts. COLIBRI telescope is a two-mirror Ritchey-Chrétien telescope whose concave primary and convex secondary mirrors have diameters of 1325mm and 485mm respectively. The mirrors are currently manufactured at LAM (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille). In this article, the advancement of the work is presented. We also give a global overview and status of the COLIBRI project.
We present in this article some of the techniques applied at the Instituto de Astronomía of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IA-UNAM) to the mechanical structural design for astronomical instruments. With this purpose we use two recent projects developed by the Instrumentation Department. The goal of this work is to give guidelines about support structures design for achieving a faster and accurate astronomical instruments design. The main guidelines that lead all the design stages for instrument subsystems are the high-level requirements and the overall specifications. From these, each subsystem needs to get its own requirements, specifications, modes of operation, relative position, tip/tilt angles, and general tolerances. Normally these values are stated in the error budget of the instrument. Nevertheless, the error budget is dynamic, it is changing constantly. Depending on the manufacturing accuracy achieved, the error budget is again distributed. That is why having guidelines for structural design helps to know some of the limits of tolerances in manufacture and assembly. The error budget becomes then a quantified way for the interaction between groups; it is the key for teamwork.
Historically, the optical coating community has greatly improved the environmental stability of interference filters through the incorporation of energetic processes into the deposition chamber. This approach brought especially about a stabilization of their spectral features with respect to pressure changes, as occurring during the launching phase in space applications. The objective of our work was to quantify with a very high resolution (few picometers) the spectral shift under vacuum exposure of narrow bandpass filters manufactured by Dual Ion Beam Sputtering (DIBS).
We will give first a description of the structure of these filters completed by a presentation of their manufacturing procedure, then a detailed description of our experimental set-up, and at the end a presentation of the results of our measurements on these two specific narrow bandpass filters.
After two years of research and development under ESO support, LAM and Thales SESO present the results of their experiment for the fast and accurate polishing under stress of ELT 1.5 meter segments as well as the industrialization approach for mass production. Based on stress polishing, this manufacturing method requires the conception of a warping harness able to generate extremely accurate bending of the optical surface of the segments during the polishing. The conception of the warping harness is based on finite element analysis and allowed a fine tuning of each geometrical parameter of the system in order to fit an error budget of 25nm RMS over 300μm of bending peak to valley. The optimisation approach uses the simulated influence functions to extract the system eigenmodes and characterise the performance. The same approach is used for the full characterisation of the system itself. The warping harness has been manufactured, integrated and assembled with the Zerodur 1.5 meter segment on the LAM 2.5meter POLARIS polishing facility. The experiment consists in a cross check of optical and mechanical measurements of the mirrors bending in order to develop a blind process, ie to bypass the optical measurement during the final industrial process. This article describes the optical and mechanical measurements, the influence functions and eigenmodes of the system and the full performance characterisation of the warping harness.
The Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) is involved in the prototyping of a full scale demonstrator for
stress polishing of segments for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Stress polishing method is developed
at LAM since more than 40 years, and this mature technology has recently been used with success for VLT instruments.
Stress polishing is now considered as a promising manufacturing method for mass production of large off axis mirrors,
specifically for ELT segments. This powerful method, based on elasticity theory, allows the generation of super-smooth
off-axis aspherics with a minimal amount of high spatial frequency ripples by spherically polishing a warped blank with
a full-sized tool. Thanks to the simple spherical polishing, the operation time can be strongly reduced compared to the
time-consuming sub-aperture tool methods of grinding and polishing. The goal is to rapidly converge to less than 1
micron RMS of optical quality on a circular blank which will be finally cut hexagonally and finished using Ion Beam
Finishing. In this paper we will present the status of the demonstrator and the design of the warping harness prototype
that must be able to precisely warp the circular blank.
In this article, a stitching Shack-Hartmann profilometric head is presented. This instrument has been developed to answer
improved needs for surface metrology in the domain of short-wavelength optics (X/EUV). It is composed of a highaccuracy
Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor and an illumination platform. This profilometric head is mounted on a
translation stage to perform bidimensional mappings by stitching together successive sub-aperture acquisitions. This
method ensures the submicroradian accuracy of the system and allows the user to measure large surfaces with a submillimetric
spatial resolution.
We particularly emphasize on the calibration method of the head; this method is validated by characterizing a super-flat
reference mirror. Cross-checked tests with the Soleil's long-trace profiler are also performed. The high precision of
profilometric head has been validated with the characterization of a spherical mirror. We also emphasize on the large
curvature dynamic range of the instrument with the measurement of an X-ray toric mirror.
The instrument, which performs a complete diagnostic of the surface or wavefront under test, finds its main applications
in metrology (measurement of large optics/wafers, post-polishing control and local surface finishing for the industry,
spatial quality control of laser beam).
We report in this manuscript the study of solid-spaced Fabry-Perot filters. The use of high quality wafers as thick spacers and broadband dielectric mirrors with only few layers provides filters which have almost the same specifications as classical WDM interference filters. Multiple cavity filters, composed of single cavities of equal or different thick spacers are easy to manufacture and exhibit very low absorption and scattering losses. Experimental
results concerning simple and double cavity filters with thick spacers centered at 1.56 μm with a maximum transmission more than 98 % and a full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of about 0.5 μm are exposed. We then propose different solutions for the extension to triple cavity filters with improved spectral properties.
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