The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) is a three robotic telescope project to detect stellar occultation events generated by TNOs. TAOS II aims to monitor about 10000 stars simultaneously at 20Hz to generate a significant event rate. The TAOS II cameras are designed to cover the 1.7 degree diameter field of view of the 1.3m telescopes with a mosaic of ten 4.5k × 2k e2v CIS 113 CMOS sensors. The CIS 113 has a back-illuminated thinned structure to provide similar performance to that of back-thinned CCDs. The CIS 113 device has 16 micron pixels with 8 outputs, with a plate scale about 0.63”/pixel. With the freedom of direct row and column addressing, star boxes with sizes of 8 × 8 pixels in each sensor can be sampled at 20 Hz or higher with a pixel rate of 1M pixel/sec per channel. The sensors, mounted on a single Invar plate, are cooled to an operating temperature of about 200K by a cryogenic cooler. The gap between two sensors is about 0.5mm. The control electronics consist of an analog part and a Xilinx FPGA based digital circuit. One FPGA is needed to control and process the signal from each CIS 113 chip. Two large PCBs were used to fanout signals from the 10 CMOS devices through the vacuum chamber wall. A synchronization circuit receives a pulse from the control building to ensure the timing error of exposures of the three cameras is within 1 ms. The cameras were delivered and installed on the TAOS telescopes in 2023 and series of tests and adjustments have been carried out to optimize the performance. In this presentation, the camera performance in the full frame mode and the window mode will be detailed. The synchronization and the adjustment among the three cameras will also be presented.
The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) is a three robotic telescope project to detect stellar occultation events generated by TransNeptunian objects (TNOs). TAOS II aims to monitor about 10000 stars simultaneously at 20Hz to generate a significant event rate. The TAOS II cameras are designed to cover the 1.7 degree diameter field of view of the 1.3m telescopes with a mosaic of ten 4.5k × 2k Teledyne e2v CIS 113 CMOS sensors. The CIS 113 has a back-illuminated thinned structure to provide similar performance to that of back-thinned CCDs. The CIS 113 device has 16 micron pixels with 8 outputs, with a plate scale about 0.63”/pixel. With the freedom of direct row and column addressing, star boxes with sizes of 8 × 8 pixels in each sensor can be sampled at 20 Hz or higher with a pixel rate of 1M pixel/sec per channel. The sensors, mounted on a single Invar plate, are cooled to an operating temperature of about 200K by a cryogenic cooler. The surfaces of the sensors were mounted to be within 30 microns to maintain a flat focal plane. The gap between two sensors is about 0.5mm. The control electronics consist of an analog part and a Xilinx FPGA based digital circuit. One FPGA controls and processes the signal from each CIS 113 chip. Two large PCBs were used to fanout signals from the 10 CMOS devices through the vacuum chamber wall. A synchronization circuit receives a pulse from the control center to ensure the timing accuracy of exposures of the three cameras is within 1 ms.
We report the testing results of the Teledyne e2v CIS 113 CMOS sensor at temperatures from room temperature down to 168K. The CIS 113 sensor is a customized device for the Transneptunian Automatic Occultation Survey (TAOS II) project. The sensor has 1920 × 4608, 16 μm pixels with 8 outputs. The pixels have a 5T design to provide anti-blooming capability with 18 μm thick high resistivity epitaxial silicon. The sensor provides two parallel and eight serial registers so the region of interests can be addressed and rapidly read out separately through different output channels. More than one thousand 8 × 8 star boxes can be sampled at a frame rate higher than 20 Hz. With a package similar to large format Teledyne e2v CCDs, the CIS 113 is three-side buttable. The device shows peak QE about 77% in 500-600 nm, readout noise around 3eand dark current lower than 2 e-/s/pix at -40 ℃. The linear full well for the device is higher at lower temperature and it is about 14400 e- at temperature lower than 210K. The device performance meets the science requirements with the operation temperature around 200K for TAOS II.
The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) will aim to detect occultations of stars by small (~1 km diameter) objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Such events are very rare (< 10−3 events per star per year) and short in duration (~200 ms), so many stars must be monitored at a high readout cadence in order to detect events. TAOS II will operate three 1.3 meter telescopes at the Observatorio Astronomico Nacional at San Pedro Martir in Baja California, Mexico. With a 2.3 square degree field of view and a high speed camera comprising CMOS imagers, the survey will monitor 10,000 stars simultaneously with all three telescopes at a readout cadence of 20 Hz. Construction of the site began in the fall of 2013, and the survey will begin by the end of 2018. This paper describes the observing system and provides an update on the status of the survey infrastructure.
The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) is a three robotic telescope project to detect the stellar occultation events generated by TransNeptunian Objects (TNOs). TAOS II project aims to monitor about 10000 stars simultaneously at 20Hz to enable statistically significant event rate. The TAOS II camera is designed to cover the 1.7 degrees diameter field of view of the 1.3m telescope with 10 mosaic 4.5k×2k CMOS sensors. The new CMOS sensor (CIS 113) has a back illumination thinned structure and high sensitivity to provide similar performance to that of the back-illumination thinned CCDs. Due to the requirements of high performance and high speed, the development of the new CMOS sensor is still in progress. Before the science arrays are delivered, a prototype camera is developed to help on the commissioning of the robotic telescope system. The prototype camera uses the small format e2v CIS 107 device but with the same dewar and also the similar control electronics as the TAOS II science camera. The sensors, mounted on a single Invar plate, are cooled to the operation temperature of about 200K as the science array by a cryogenic cooler. The Invar plate is connected to the dewar body through a supporting ring with three G10 bipods. The control electronics consists of analog part and a Xilinx FPGA based digital circuit. One FPGA is needed to control and process the signal from a CMOS sensor for 20Hz region of interests (ROI) readout.
The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) is a robotic telescope system using three telescopes in San Pedro Martir Observatory in Mexico. It measures occultation of background stars by small TransNeptunian Objects (TNO) in order to determine their size distribution. Each telescope focal plane uses ten buttable backthinned CMOS sensors. Key performance features of the sensors are: Large array format 4608 x 1920, Pixel size 16μm, Multi ROIs, 8 analogue video channels, Frame rate of 20-40 fps [using ROIs], Low noise <3e-, Cryogenic dark current <0.1e-/pixel/s, backthinned for >90% peak quantum efficiency. The paper describes top level application requirements for the TAOS II detector. The sensor design including the pixel and buttable package are described together with performance at room temperature and cryogenic temperature of backthinned devices. The key performance specifications have been demonstrated and will be presented. The production set of 40 devices are due for completion within 2017.
KEYWORDS: Telescopes, Stars, Space telescopes, Signal to noise ratio, Diffraction, Cameras, Scanning probe microscopy, Design for manufacturing, Astronomy, Sensors
The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) will aim to detect occultations of stars by small (~1 km diameter) objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Such events are very rare (< 10−3 events per star per year) and short in duration (~200 ms), so many stars must be monitored at a high readout cadence. TAOS II will operate three 1.3 meter telescopes at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional at San Pedro Mártir in Baja California, México. With a 2.3 square degree field of view and a high speed camera comprising CMOS imagers, the survey will monitor 10,000 stars simultaneously with all three telescopes at a readout cadence of 20 Hz. Construction of the site began in the fall of 2013, and the survey will begin in the summer of 2017.
The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) is a three robotic telescope project to detect the stellar
occultation events generated by Trans Neptunian Objects (TNOs). TAOS II project aims to monitor about 10000 stars
simultaneously at 20Hz to enable statistically significant event rate. The TAOS II camera is designed to cover the 1.7
degree diameter field of view (FoV) of the 1.3m telescope with 10 mosaic 4.5kx2k CMOS sensors. The new CMOS
sensor has a back illumination thinned structure and high sensitivity to provide similar performance to that of the backillumination thinned CCDs. The sensor provides two parallel and eight serial decoders so the region of interests can be
addressed and read out separately through different output channels efficiently. The pixel scale is about 0.6"/pix with the
16μm pixels. The sensors, mounted on a single Invar plate, are cooled to the operation temperature of about 200K by a
cryogenic cooler. The Invar plate is connected to the dewar body through a supporting ring with three G10 bipods. The
deformation of the cold plate is less than 10μm to ensure the sensor surface is always within ±40μm of focus range. The
control electronics consists of analog part and a Xilinx FPGA based digital circuit. For each field star, 8×8 pixels box
will be readout. The pixel rate for each channel is about 1Mpix/s and the total pixel rate for each camera is about
80Mpix/s. The FPGA module will calculate the total flux and also the centroid coordinates for every field star in each
exposure.
We report the testing result of e2v CIS 107 CMOS sensor for temperature from 300K to 170K. The CIS 107 sensor is a prototype device with 10 different variations of pixel designs. The sensor has 1500 × 2000, 7 μm pixels with 4 outputs. Each variation covers 1500 × 200 pixels. These are 4T pixels with high resistivity epitaxial silicon and back thinned to 11μm. At room temperature, the several variants of pixels show peak QE higher than 90%, readout noise around 5e- and dark current around 50e-/s/pix. The full well is about 15000 e- due to the limitation of the transfer gate capacitor. The CIS 107 device was further characterized at different device temperatures from 170K to 300K. The readout noise decreases and the full well increases as the device is operated at lower temperature.
The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) will aim to detect occultations of stars by small (~1 km diameter) objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Such events are very rare (< 10-3 events per star per year) and short in duration (~200 ms), so many stars must be monitored at a high readout cadence. TAOS II will operate three 1.3 meter telescopes at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional at San Pedro Mártir in Baja California, México. With a 2.3 square degree field of view and a high speed camera comprising CMOS imagers, the survey will monitor 10,000 stars simultaneously with all three telescopes at a readout cadence of 20 Hz. Construction of the site began in the fall of 2013.
KEYWORDS: Imaging systems, Stars, Photometry, Telescopes, Signal processing, Interference (communication), Charge-coupled devices, Cadmium sulfide, Transistors, Signal to noise ratio
The TAOS II Project requires high-speed differential photometry of 10-20 thousand stars over a telescope field of
154mm diameter with 16-micron spatial resolution and good noise performance. We are developing a custom CMOS
imager array to accomplish this task.
The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) will aim to detect occultations of stars by small ( 1 km diameter) objects in the Solar System and beyond. Such events are very rare (< 10−3 events per star per year) and short in duration ( 200 ms), so many stars must be monitored at a high readout cadence. TAOS II will operate three 1.3 meter telescopes at the Observatorio Astron´omico Nacional at San Pedro Martir in Baja California, Mexico. With a 2.3 square degree field of view and a high speed camera comprising CMOS imagers, the survey will monitor 10,000 stars simultaneously with all three telescopes at a readout cadence of 20 Hz.
In the last few years the ubiquitous availability of high bandwidth networks has changed the way both robotic and non-robotic telescopes operate, with single isolated telescopes being integrated into expanding "smart" telescope networks that can span continents and respond to transient events in seconds. The Heterogeneous Telescope Networks (HTN)* Consortium represents a number of major research groups in the field of robotic telescopes, and together we are proposing a standards based approach to providing interoperability between the existing proprietary telescope networks. We further propose standards for interoperability, and integration with, the emerging Virtual Observatory.
We present the results of the first interoperability meeting held last year and discuss the protocol and transport standards agreed at the meeting, which deals with the complex issue of how to optimally schedule observations on geographically distributed resources. We discuss a free market approach to this scheduling problem, which must initially be based on ad-hoc agreements between the participants in the network, but which may eventually expand into a electronic market for the exchange of telescope time.
The MACHO experiment is searching for dark matter in the halo of the Galaxy by monitoring more than 50 million stars in the LMC, SMC, and Galactic bulge for gravitational microlensing events. The hardware consists of a 50 inch telescope, a two-color 32 megapixel ccd camera and a network of computers. On clear nights the system generates up to 8 GB of raw data and 1 GB of reduced data. The computer system is responsible for all realtime control tasks, for data reduction, and for storing all data associated with each observation in a database. The subject of this paper is the software system that handles these functions. It is an integrated system controlled by Petri nets that consists of multiple processes communicating via mailboxes and a bulletin board. The system is highly automated, readily extensive, and incorporates flexible error recovery capabilities. It is implemented with C++ in a Unix environment.
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