First light (at ING): June 2021
De-commissioned: 27 May 2024
Designed and built by: University of Hertfordshire
Description: The concept relies on separating the complexity introduced by Earth from the requirements of the spectrometer unit itself. This separation
enables a massive reduction in size and complexity on the spectrometer side and it is the natural complement to Adaptive Optics technologies being developed elsewhere. The concepts demonstrated here might be used to save tens of millions of pounds in instrumentation costs on the coming generation of extremely large telescopes but also be reproducible by University, public and amateur observatories and offer a competitive alternative to the purchase of large inefficient Fourier transform spectrometers in the wider marketplace. The key developments that we wish to demonstrate are, (1) a compact inexpensive design that can achieve the same performance as existing instruments in terms of wavelength coverage and spectral resolution and (2) bespoke active metrology/actuation of the system to achieve -or even surpass- the best wavelength calibration stability at a fraction of construction and operation costs and to produce a facility instrument.
Time allocations:
Nights scheduled since semester 2007B
Instrument information: https://star.herts.ac.uk/exohspec/
Multimedia:
Photo archive (1)
