On-sky performance of a high resolution silicon immersion grating spectrometer

Jian Ge; Scott Powell; Bo Zhao; Sidney Schofield; Frank Varosi; Craig Warner; Jian Liu; Sirinrat Sithajan; Louis Avner; Hali Jakeman; Jakob A. Gittelmacher; William A. Yoder; Matthew Muterspaugh; Michael Williamson; J. Edward Maxwell

doi:10.1117/12.2057023

8 July 2014 On-sky performance of a high resolution silicon immersion grating spectrometer

Jian Ge, Scott Powell, Bo Zhao, Sidney Schofield, Frank Varosi, Craig Warner, Jian Liu, Sirinrat Sithajan, Louis Avner, Hali Jakeman, Jakob A. Gittelmacher, William A. Yoder, Matthew Muterspaugh, Michael Williamson, J. Edward Maxwell

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V; 91471A (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2057023
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2014, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

High resolution infrared spectroscopy has been a major challenging task to accomplish in astronomy due to the enormous size and cost of IR spectrographs built with traditional gratings. A silicon immersion grating, due to its over three times high dispersion over a traditional reflective grating, offers a compact and low cost design of new generation IR high resolution spectrographs. Here we report the on-sky performance of the first silicon immersion grating spectrometer, called Florida IR Silicon immersion grating spectromeTer (FIRST), commissioned at the 2-meter Automatic Spectroscopic Telescope (AST) of Fairborn Observatory in Arizona in October 2013. The measured spectral resolution is R=50,000 with a 50 mm diameter spectrograph pupil and a blaze angle of 54.7 degree. The 1.4-1.8 m wavelength region (the Red channel) is completely covered in a single exposure with a 2kx2k H2RG IR array while the 0.8-1.35 μm region is nearly completely covered by the cross-dispersed echelle mode (the Blue channel) at R=50,000 in a single exposure. The instrument is operated in a high vacuum (about 1 micro torr) and cryogenic temperatures (the bench at 189K and the detector at 87K) and with a precise temperature control. It is primarily used for high precision Doppler measurements (~3 m/s) of low mass M dwarf stars for the identification and characterization of extrasolar planets. A plan for a high cadence and high precision survey of habitable super-Earths around ~150 nearby M dwarfs and a major upgrade with integral field unit low resolution spectroscopy are also introduced.

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Jian Ge, Scott Powell, Bo Zhao, Sidney Schofield, Frank Varosi, Craig Warner, Jian Liu, Sirinrat Sithajan, Louis Avner, Hali Jakeman, Jakob A. Gittelmacher, William A. Yoder, Matthew Muterspaugh, Michael Williamson, and J. Edward Maxwell "On-sky performance of a high resolution silicon immersion grating spectrometer", Proc. SPIE 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V, 91471A (8 July 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2057023

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