The FIREBall fiber-fed UV spectrograph
Creators
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1.
Columbia University
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2.
California Institute of Technology
Contributors
Others:
Abstract
FIREBall (Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon) had a successful first engineering flight in July of 2007 from Palestine, Texas. Here we detail the design and construction of the spectrograph. FIREBall consists of a 1m telescope coupled to a fiber-fed ultraviolet spectrograph flown on a short duration balloon. The spectrograph is designed to map hydrogen and metal line emission from the intergalactic medium at several redshifts below z=1, exploiting a small window in atmospheric oxygen absorption at balloon altitudes. The instrument is a wide-field IFU fed by almost 400 fibers. The Offner mount spectrograph is designed to be sensitive in the 195-215nm window accessible at our altitudes of 35-40km. We are able to observe Lyα, as well as OVI and CIV doublets, from 0.3 < z < 0.9. Observations of UV bright B stars and background measurements allow characterization of throughput for the entire system and will inform future flights.
Additional Information
© 2008 SPIE. The authors would like to thank Victoria Johnston, David Stenning, and Eve LoCastro for their hard work in the lab. The crew at CSBF was fantastic and make launching a balloon seem (almost) easy.Attached Files
Published - 70141T_1-1.pdf
Files
70141T_1-1.pdf
Additional details
Identifiers
- Eprint ID
- 75799
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170406-103359612
Dates
- Created
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2017-04-06Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- Space Astrophysics Laboratory
- Series Name
- Proceedings of SPIE
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 7014