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Next: 2.5 The Fabry-Pérot Spectrometers Up: 2. Instrument Overview Previous: 2.3 The LWS Optics


2.4 The Grating Spectrometer

Figure 2.4: The side view shows an incident beam (red line), diffracted by the grating at its rest position (solid blue line, limits of rotation shown by dashed blue line). The shorter wavelength radiation went to SW1 and the longer to LW5, via the spherical condensing mirror. The middle panel indicates the elliptical footprint of the beam. The bottom diagram shows the angle of the incident beam to the normal. The diffracted beam was also normal to the grating (for one wavelength), in its rest position, because a blaze angle of 30$^{\circ}$ was chosen for optimum performance.
\resizebox {11.5cm}{!}{\includegraphics{grating2.eps}}

In its rest position, the grating normal was at 60$^{\circ}$ to the incident beam (see Figure 2.4). By rotating the grating, by means of a servo-controlled drive mechanism, between $-7^{\circ}$ and $+7^{\circ}$ (the physical limits of its motion), the centre of the grating response function was scanned over a wavelength band, for SW4 this ranged from 64 to 86$\mu $m; it is shown in the upper panel of Figure 2.5. Considering each detector in turn, a contiguous coverage from 45 to 180$\mu $m was achieved by rotating the grating from $-3.5^{\circ}$ to $+3.5^{\circ}$. By using the extended range of operation ($-7^{\circ}$ to $+7^{\circ}$) -- at the cost of a small increase in power dissipated in the focal plane -- the spectral range was extended to cover 43-197$\mu $m, whilst giving significant overlap between the spectral coverage of adjacent-wavelength detector channels. In order to maximise the sensitivity of the instrument at all wavelengths, the extended scanning range has been used in normal operation. The wavelength ranges used for each detector, along with the overlaps, are indicated in the upper panel of Figure 2.5 (note that the limitations on the detector wavelength ranges, as discussed below, are taken into account). The nominal well calibrated ranges are shown in yellow. The extended range gave important verification when looking for weak line features and afforded redundancy in the instrument if there had been a catastrophic failure in one detector.

Figure 2.5: The top plot shows the range covered by each of the ten detectors, by rotating the grating to its extremes, along with the grating order and the FP wheel used. The yellow regions indicate the nominal wavelength ranges. The second plot shows the second order grating spectral element (red) at a grating angle of $-1.36^{\circ}$. It also shows the adjacent orders of this radiation and the detector filter which prevented these orders from reaching the detector. The final plot shows the n$^{th}$ order Airy profile of the FP with the superimposed grating spectral element, also the range of wavelengths which could be covered by changing the mesh separation is indicated by the green arrows. The neighbouring peaks that fell outside of the grating response are indicated.
\resizebox {11.5cm}{!}{\includegraphics{big_plot.eps}}

The grating diffracts radiation of wavelength $\lambda$ in first order at the same angle as wavelength $\lambda /2$ in second order and as wavelength $\lambda /n$ in $n^{th}$ order. With this constraint it was not possible to utilise the full wavelength coverage afforded by the range of possible scan angles. To ensure that only the required narrow band of wavelengths is detected at a particular grating angle, and not the wavelengths in different orders, filters with well-defined passbands were placed in front of the detectors. The transmission of the filters, measured by Ade (private communication), is shown in Figure 2.6. The resulting nominal wavelength limits for each band are given in Table  2.3. They take into account the following limitations:

Clearly these factors resulted in a small loss in redundancy over the LWS range. The detectors are discussed in Section 2.6.

Figure 2.6: The LWS flight model filters measured by Ade (private communication). They are in sequential order SW1 to LW5 (from right to left), see also Table 2.1.
\resizebox {13cm}{!}{\includegraphics{this_iso_fm_filters.eps}}

Figure 2.7: The LWS flight model detector responses measured by Ade (private communication). LW5 is shown by the blue curve, LW4 red, LW3 green, LW2 cyan, SW2-LW1 yellow and SW1 magenta.
\resizebox {13cm}{!}{\includegraphics{iso_fm_detectors.eps}}

The central panel in Figure 2.5 shows the nominal wavelength range covered by SW4, as determined by its filter. When the grating was in its rest position, the central wavelength falling on this detector was 75$\mu $m. With the grating at an angle of $-1.36^{\circ}$ its spectral response function (red) fell at 73.5$\mu $m. The lower panel shows the range of the wavelengths that fell on the detector at this angle, as given by the grating spectral element (red).


Table 2.1: Theoretical and measured LWS detector aperture sizes in the dispersion direction, Y, and the non-dispersion direction, X. Also the serial numbers of the detectors, bandpass filters and edge filters used on the LWS are listed.
Det Y X Detector Bandpass Edge Filter
  Measured Design Measured Design Serial Filter Serial Serial
  [$\mu $m] [$\mu $m] [mm] [mm] Number Number Number
               
SW1 494 500 1.34 1.29 7 325 8
SW2 529 530 1.32 1.29 9 321 50
SW3 529 540 1.30 1.29 13 319 6
SW4 617 610 1.34 1.29 11 313 12
SW5 640 650 1.35 1.29 12 309 9
LW1 580 570 1.34 1.29 10 306 2
LW2 617 620 1.35 1.29 55 302 1
LW3 652 650 1.34 1.29 56 328 5
LW4 700 690 1.32 1.29 58 296 4
LW5 758 750 1.30 1.29 57 292 3

The re-imaged size of the beam, $W$, at the detector array was determined by the focal ratios of the collimator ($f_{col}=15$) and the condenser ($f_{con}=1.5$ in the dispersion direction and $f_{con}=3$ in the non-dispersion direction as dictated by the anamorphic magnification, see below) and the size of the focal plane aperture, M2 ($d$) such that:

\begin{displaymath}
W=d~\frac{f_{con}}{f_{col}}\
\end{displaymath} (2.1)

This gives a theoretical aperture size in the non-dispersion direction -- which is the same for all detectors and for all grating angles -- of 0.93mm. These were set to be larger than this, $\sim$1.30mm, to allow for diffraction and detector misalignment.

Equation 2.1 gives the aperture size in the dispersion direction to be 0.465mm. However, there is a modification of the beam cross-section which is referred to as anamorphic magnification (AMAG; the ratio of the diameter in the non-dispersion direction to that in the dispersion direction). It occurred because the radiation was not specularly reflected with respect to the plane of the grating, hence the emergent beam was elliptical. (The incident beam was circular and it made an elliptical footprint on the grating, but this was due to purely geometrical effects.) This AMAG reduced the image size such that a detector aperture of 0.7mm was actually required for the dispersion direction.

AMAG was smallest for the most positive scan angles (long wavelength end) of each detector range, so to ensure good efficiency the positive scan angle limit was used to determine the beam size and consequently the aperture size for each detector in the dispersion direction. The final measured and designed aperture sizes for the detectors are given in Table 2.1 along with the serial numbers of the actual detectors, bandpass filters and edge filters that flew on ISO.

For the LWS the AMAG is typically equal to two. As the parallel beam had a width of 34mm, the beam was typically dispersed over 68mm. The grating was ruled with 7.9 lines per mm, hence the number of lines covered by the beam in the dispersion direction was $\sim$540. For the above configuration, the chromatic resolving power ($mN$, where $m$ is the order and $N$ is the number of lines) is $\sim$1080 in second order and $\sim$540 in first. However, in reality the chromatic resolution depends on the detector location (as different detectors view the grating at different angles) and also on the scan angle of the grating. The LWS beam size is wavelength dependent. An effective aperture radius for each detector has been defined by Lloyd 2000, [27] (see Section 5.9) and is listed in Table 5.9.

This array was therefore capable of simultaneously detecting ten spectral elements within the LWS spectral region. However, the packing density of the detectors was sparse (limited by the size of the detector mounts), so to get complete spectral coverage the grating had to be scanned to move the wavelengths sequentially across each detector. By having ten detectors rather than one, the whole spectrum could be obtained in a tenth of the time. Because of the wide spectral coverage of the LWS, it was necessary to use the grating in first order for wavelengths from 94.6-196.9$\mu $m and second order for wavelengths 43-94.6$\mu $m, to maximise its efficiency. The grating efficiency measurements, as performed by Petti 1989, [31], are shown in Figure 2.8. Because of the two orders used in the LWS, it was necessary to interleave the long wavelength detectors between the short wavelength detectors to make optimum use of the limited space available whilst maintaining the maximum spectral range. Accordingly, the detectors are labelled SW1 though SW5 for the short wavelength set and LW1 to LW5 for the long wavelength set. The detectors in their different positions saw the grating at different angles. The diffracted beam for detector SW1 emerged at an angle of $+7.9^{\circ}$ with respect to the grating normal, as shown in the top part of Figure 2.4. A simplistic way to determine where the detectors were located in the LWS is to refer to the angle between the incident beam and the direction of the detector from the grating, as tabulated in Table 2.2.

Figure 2.8: The efficiency of the LWS grating.
\resizebox {13cm}{!}{\includegraphics{grat_eff.ps}}


Table 2.2: The angles (ground and in orbit) between the incident beam on the grating and the detectors (these angles are shown in Figure 2.4 for SW1 and LW5) and the corresponding wavelengths for the grating in the nominal position.
Detector Detector Angles [$^{\circ}$] Wavelength [$\mu $m]
  Ground In Orbit Ground In Orbit
         
SW1 67.938 67.80 46.0711 46.2220
LW1 63.411 63.26 102.092 102.425
SW2 58.889 58.74 56.0389 56.2033
LW2 54.370 54.29 122.042 122.218
SW3 49.885 49.71 65.9272 66.1173
LW3 45.340 45.27 141.659 141.809
SW4 40.825 40.73 75.6000 75.6989
LW4 36.308 36.275 160.487 160.554
SW5 31.785 31.72 84.7346 84.7977
LW5 27.256 27.32 178.090 177.971


next up previous contents index
Next: 2.5 The Fabry-Pérot Spectrometers Up: 2. Instrument Overview Previous: 2.3 The LWS Optics
ISO Handbook Volume III (LWS), Version 2.1, SAI/1999-057/Dc