A common-user Cooled Grating Array Spectrometer has been built for use at the cassegrain focus of the 3.8m UK Infrared Telescope. The instrument which is designed to give reso-lutions (R = λ/tλ) of around 500 over the 1 - 5 micron spectral range uses a seven element Indium Antimonide array. The exit apertures of the system are defined by the array elements so that seven almost adjacent resolution elements are sampled simultaneously. A pair of gold coated replica gratings on copper substrates are mounted back to back to give high efficiency over the whole wavelength range. The spectrometer is mounted in a commercially available cryostat with the optics cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature and the array and associated electronics cooled to solid nitrogen temperature. A number of room temperature Fabry Perot etalons are available which can be mounted in front of the spectro-meter to increase the resolution up to 10 km s between 2 and 5 microns. The grating spectrometer and Fabry-Perot system have both been successfuly commissioned on the Telescope. Sensitivity and other test data will be presented along with a description of the spectrometer, array, electronics and Fabry-Perot system.

Date Published: 9 January 1984
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 0445, Instrumentation in Astronomy V, (9 January 1984); doi: 10.1117/12.966125

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0445:
Instrumentation in Astronomy V
Alec Boksenberg; David L. Crawford, Editor(s)