The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) is a three robotic telescope project to detect stellar occultation events generated by TNOs. TAOS II aims to monitor about 10000 stars simultaneously at 20Hz to generate a significant event rate. The TAOS II cameras are designed to cover the 1.7 degree diameter field of view of the 1.3m telescopes with a mosaic of ten 4.5k × 2k e2v CIS 113 CMOS sensors. The CIS 113 has a back-illuminated thinned structure to provide similar performance to that of back-thinned CCDs. The CIS 113 device has 16 micron pixels with 8 outputs, with a plate scale about 0.63”/pixel. With the freedom of direct row and column addressing, star boxes with sizes of 8 × 8 pixels in each sensor can be sampled at 20 Hz or higher with a pixel rate of 1M pixel/sec per channel. The sensors, mounted on a single Invar plate, are cooled to an operating temperature of about 200K by a cryogenic cooler. The gap between two sensors is about 0.5mm. The control electronics consist of an analog part and a Xilinx FPGA based digital circuit. One FPGA is needed to control and process the signal from each CIS 113 chip. Two large PCBs were used to fanout signals from the 10 CMOS devices through the vacuum chamber wall. A synchronization circuit receives a pulse from the control building to ensure the timing error of exposures of the three cameras is within 1 ms. The cameras were delivered and installed on the TAOS telescopes in 2023 and series of tests and adjustments have been carried out to optimize the performance. In this presentation, the camera performance in the full frame mode and the window mode will be detailed. The synchronization and the adjustment among the three cameras will also be presented.
The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) will aim to detect occultations of stars by small (~1 km diameter) objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Such events are very rare (< 10−3 events per star per year) and short in duration (~200 ms), so many stars must be monitored at a high readout cadence in order to detect events. TAOS II will operate three 1.3 meter telescopes at the Observatorio Astronomico Nacional at San Pedro Martir in Baja California, Mexico. With a 2.3 square degree field of view and a high speed camera comprising CMOS imagers, the survey will monitor 10,000 stars simultaneously with all three telescopes at a readout cadence of 20 Hz. Construction of the site began in the fall of 2013, and the survey will begin by the end of 2018. This paper describes the observing system and provides an update on the status of the survey infrastructure.
KEYWORDS: Telescopes, Stars, Space telescopes, Signal to noise ratio, Diffraction, Cameras, Scanning probe microscopy, Design for manufacturing, Astronomy, Sensors
The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II) will aim to detect occultations of stars by small (~1 km diameter) objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Such events are very rare (< 10−3 events per star per year) and short in duration (~200 ms), so many stars must be monitored at a high readout cadence. TAOS II will operate three 1.3 meter telescopes at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional at San Pedro Mártir in Baja California, México. With a 2.3 square degree field of view and a high speed camera comprising CMOS imagers, the survey will monitor 10,000 stars simultaneously with all three telescopes at a readout cadence of 20 Hz. Construction of the site began in the fall of 2013, and the survey will begin in the summer of 2017.
We present a criterion to properly choose the ruling frequency during the testing process of concave mirrors using the classical Ronchi test. It is known that when the number of lines per inch (ruling frequency) is low, the Ronchi test loses sensitivity; this fact implies that it is not qualitatively possible to determine the real surface shape; only an approximation would be obtained. In addition, if a higher ruling frequency is used, the ronchigram would be exposed to diffractive effects, making it even more difficult to identify the patterns for the real surface shape. We have found that by mathematically relating the f-number of the surface and the ruling spacing, the detection range of the Ronchi test can be improved. This allows us to know the shape of the patterns with the best certainty corresponding to a given optical surface. We have analyzed the behavior of real ronchigrams produced for two different parabolic mirrors to demonstrate this fact. In addition, real ronchigrams obtained from primary mirrors of telescopes that support the use of this criterion are shown.
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