3-08
Karsten Schindler
Deutsches SOFIA Institut
A new near-infrared channel for SOFIA's Focal Plane Imager
The Focal Plane Imager (FPI+) serves a dual purpose as SOFIA's primary tracking camera and as a facility science instrument. Permanently mounted at the SOFIA telescope, it is available in parallel to any science instrument in use, enabling observations on any SOFIA flight. Its spectral coverage is currently limited to 0.4 - 1.0 µm.
It is feasible to add a second spectral channel to the existing FPI+ that covers the near-infrared, using a commercially available camera to reduce development efforts and cost. The talk will present the results from a design study to facilitate such an upgrade of the FPI+, discuss the expected sensitivity and potential benefits for operations.
Below 5 μm, SOFIA is currently only able to observe transients in a single photometric band with the FPI+. A second near-infrared channel would restore SOFIA's original capability to conduct multi-band transient observations at short wavelengths, with the unique benefit that NIR telluric absorption bands are practically absent at flight altitude. As it has been discussed in the first workshop of this series, this capability would be particularly of interest for stellar occultation studies, as SOFIA remains the only mobile observatory worldwide that is capable to position itself right at the center of such an event.
