In-flight performance of the Very high Angular resolution ULtraviolet Telescope sounding rocket payload
Abstract
The Very high Angular Resolution ULtraviolet Telescope experiment was successfully launched on May 7, 1999 on a Black Brant sounding rocket vehicle from White Sands Missile Range. The instrument consists of a 30 cm UV diffraction limited telescope followed by a double grating spectroheliograph tuned to isolate the solar Lyman (alpha) emission line. During the flight, the instrument successfully obtained a series of images of the upper chromosphere with a limiting resolution of approximately 0.33 arc-seconds. The resulting observations are the highest resolution images of the solar atmosphere obtained from space to date. The flight demonstrated that subarc-second ultraviolet images of the solar atmosphere are achievable with a high quality, moderate aperture space telescope and associated optics. Herein, we describe the payload and its in- flight performance.
- Publication:
-
Instrumentation for UV/EUV Astronomy and Solar Missions
- Pub Date:
- December 2000
- DOI:
- 10.1117/12.410533
- Bibcode:
- 2000SPIE.4139..340K