Abstract
PILOT is a balloon-borne astronomy experiment designed to study the polarization of dust emission in the diffuse interstellar medium in our Galaxy at wavelengths 240 and 550 µm with an angular resolution of about two arc-min. PILOT optics is composed of an off-axis Gregorian telescope and a refractive re-imager system. All these optical elements, except the primary mirror, are in a cryostat cooled to 3K. We used optical and 3D measurements combined with thermo-elastic modeling to perform the optical alignment. This paper describes the system analysis, the alignment procedure, and finally the performances obtained during the first flight in September 2015
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Acknowledgements
PILOT is an international project that involves several European institutes. The institutes that have contributed to hardware developments for PILOT are IRAP and CNES in Toulouse (France), IAS in Orsay (France), CEA in Saclay (France), Rome University in Rome (Italy) and Cardiff University (UK). This work was supported by the CNES. It is based on the instrumentation work preparatory to the PILOT mission, which has been flown under a balloon operated by CNES, under the agreement between CNES and CNRS/INSU, during the Timmins 2015 campaign.
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Mot, B., Longval, Y., Bernard, JP. et al. The PILOT optical alignment for its first flight. CEAS Space J 9, 459–471 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-017-0159-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-017-0159-3