FIREBAll-2 thermal control system: Performance of the 2018 flight and improvements for 2021
Abstract
The Faint Intergalactic Medium Redshifted Emission Balloon (FIREBall-2) is a UV multi-object spectrograph exploring the CGM of galaxies at low redshifts (0.3 < z < 1.0). The science detector is a EMCCD cooled by a Sunpower cryocooler to minimize the noise contributions from dark current. To efficiently remove the heat generated by the cryocooler and other critical hardware, we built a custom water cooling circuit which uses a water/alcohol/ice mixture to regulate temperatures during flight. We report the ground and flight performances of the thermal system during the 2018 campaign and the lessons learned since then. We will discuss the model predictions of the potential impacts of several major upgrades as well as modifications to adapt to those impacts, and the ground performance of the thermal system during the rebuild of FIREBall-2, compared with the model predictions, for the next launch of FIREBall-2 in Fort Sumner in 2020.
Additional Information
© 2020 SPIE.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 107133
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20201216-152239252
- Created
-
2020-12-17Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Astronomy Department
- Series Name
- Proceedings of SPIE