AFGL will begin a series of rocket borne experiments in the summer of 1981 to survey the sky in the infrared. Two cryogenically cooled telescopes systems will be used, each with a 36 cm diameter primary aperture. One system is cooled with super-critical helium and surveys in three broad spectral bands centered at 11, 20.5 and 27 um. The other telescope system has a super-fluid helium reservoir and incorporates long wavelength arrays centered at 40 and 95 pm in addition to the three shorter wavelength arrays. These experiments will be flown on ARIES sounding rockets to an altitude of 380 km. Each experiment will cover 22 to 35 percent of the sky to a noise equivalent flux density (NEFD) of 1 to 3 x 10-17wcm-2 in each of the spectral bands. This is a factor of about 20 improvement over the previous instruments we used for the 11 and 20 pm observations. The survey instrumentation is described in this report as well as how the experiment will be conducted.

Date Published: 27 July 1981
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 0280, Infrared Astronomy: Scientific/Military Thrusts and Instrumentation, (27 July 1981); doi: 10.1117/12.931944

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0280:
Infrared Astronomy: Scientific/Military Thrusts and Instrumentation
Nancy W. Boggess; Howard J. Stears, Editor(s)