Early Science Results From the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI) on the Herschel Space Observatory
- Creators
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Goldsmith, Paul F.
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Lis, Dariusz C.
Abstract
The Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI) on the Herschel Space Observatory covers 480 to 1250 GHz and 1410 to 1910 GHz for high spectral resolution astronomical spectroscopy. Herschel was launched on 14 May 2009, and following cooldown and commissioning, HIFI has been used along with the other two focal plane instruments for a wide variety of astronomical observations. These have ranged from studies of the structure of the interstellar medium in nearby galaxies to detailed studies of the chemistry in star-forming regions of the Milky Way. Observations of the solar system have yielded new results about water in comets and its relationship to the Earth's oceans. In this paper, following a brief review of the instrument and its performance, we give an overview of the most important HIFI discoveries to date. This is necessarily very selective, but is intended to give a hint of the results obtained with this instrument that has really opened submillimeter wavelengths for high-sensitivity/high-resolution spectroscopy.
Additional Information
© 2012 IEEE. Manuscript received March 05, 2012; revised April 19, 2012; accepted April 22, 2012. Date of current version July 12, 2012. The authors thank P. Morris and J. L. Pineda for allowing them to use their data prior to publication, and J. Kooi and J. Pearson for useful suggestions. They apologize to the scientists whose work could not be included in this brief review. The authors would like to thank the many people who have worked for so long to make HIFI and Herschel such a resounding success, and acknowledge, in particular, T. Phillips' leadership of U.S. HIFI involvement. This work was carried out in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 38957
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20130617-102411290
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
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2013-06-18Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field