The Future of Airborne Infrared/Submm Astronomy: Instrument Solutions

Baryshev

3-03

Andrey Baryshev
Kapteyn Astronomical Institute

Millimetron Space Mission: status and technology

Millimetron space mission of Russian Space agency is a far infrared space observatory. Millimetron will have a solid deployable primary mirror of 10m diameter. Mirror surface accuracy specification is better than 10 micron RMS while the goal is to reach 5 micron RMS. Primary mirror will be cooled to a cryogenic temperatures of up to 10K and temperature levels of ~80K, 20K, 4K and 2K will be provided for scientific instruments. The spacecraft will be located in the region of Lagrange L2 point which provides an ideal environment for observation. The guaranteed cryogenic lifetime of the mission is 3 years while total mission duration will be 10 years. Current plan for launch is 2030.
Millimetron will operate both in a single dish and in a space Earth VLBI mode. In VLBI mode the measured astronomical signal will be digitized and stored in to a mass on-board memory. Due to limitations of the downlink speed and possible space-earth telescope/source configurations the observation time in this mode will be limited. Most of the observing time will be spent in the independent single dish observing mode, similar to the one of HERSCHEL space mission. Instrumentation suite of Millimetron will include both high spectral resolution heterodyne receivers in the frequency range from 80 GHz to 2 THz (and higher) and bolometric spectrometers and camera. Four types of instruments are envisaged: a SVLBI instrument which will have a single pixel dual polarization  heterodyne receivers in the frequency range of 80-400 GHz; a high resolution spectrometer, which is a heterodyne instrument similar to HERSCHEL HIFI but with small size focal plane arrays for improved mapping; a low resolution camera spectrometer which is a differential Fourier transform spectrometer covering 100-1000GHz band in low spectral resolution and a bolometric polarization sensitive multi-band camera spectrometer. All these technologies and components have a large synergy with ones used in airborne and balloon astronomical projects..
In this contribution we will describe the development status of millimetron space mission and it’s mission critical components. We will outline a break through science objective and discuss critical instrument technologies.