End-to-end ground calibration and in-flight performance of the FIREBall-2 instrument

Vincent Picouet , Bruno Milliard (1) , Gillian Kyne , Didier Vibert (1) , David Schiminovich , Christopher Martin , Erika Hamden , Keri Hoadley , Johan Montel (2) , Nicole Melso , Donal O'Sullivan , Jean Evrard (2) , Etienne Perot (2) , Robert Grange (1) , Shouleh Nikzad , Philippe Balard (1) , Patrick Blanchard (1) , Frederi Mirc (2) , Nicolas Bray (2) , April Jewell , Samuel Quiret (1)

1 LAM - Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille
2 CNES - Centre National d'Études Spatiales [Toulouse]

The payload of the Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon (FIREBall-2), the second generation of the FIREBall instrument (PI: C. Martin, Caltech), has been calibrated and launched from the NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. FIREBall-2 was launched for the first time on the September 22, 2018, and the payload performed the very first multi-object acquisition from space using a multi-object spectrograph. Our performance-oriented paper presents the calibration and last ground adjustments of FIREBall-2, the in-flight performance assessed based on the flight data, and the predicted instrument's ultimate sensitivity. This analysis predicts that future flights of FIREBall-2 should be able to detect the HI Lyα resonance line in galaxies at z ∼ 0.67, but will find it challenging to spatially resolve the circumgalactic medium.

Domains: Sciences of the Universe [physics]

Vincent Picouet, Bruno Milliard, Gillian Kyne, Didier Vibert, David Schiminovich, et al.. End-to-end ground calibration and in-flight performance of the FIREBall-2 instrument. Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, 2020, 6, ⟨10.1117/1.JATIS.6.4.044004⟩. ⟨insu-03667054⟩