Facilities for the Calibration, Construction, and Environmental Testing of Instruments and Detectors in the EUV and FUV

摘要

Within the Space Sciences Division at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), new facilities have been built and old facilities have been upgraded to provide greater accuracy and precision during the calibration of instruments used for observation of Extreme and Far ultraviolet airglow emission in the upper atmosphere. In addition to the calibration of whole instruments, the facilities necessary for the construction and characterization of the detectors used in the aforementioned spectral region now either exist or are in their final stages of construction. Also in existence at the Naval Research Laboratory are the facilities for the environmental testing of instruments and components for the space environment. The heart of the NRL ultraviolet calibration facilities is an oil-free vacuum chamber, 2-meters in length, with a diameter of 1.67 meters containing an optical test bench 1.2 m wide by 1.5 m long. Some of the various instruments that have already been calibrated in the chamber are the High Resolution Atmosphere and Auroral Spectrographs flown aboard the Air Force Advance Research and Global Observing Satellite and the five Special Sensor Ultraviolet Limb Imagers for the Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. The chamber's hardware and control software have been upgraded. The software upgrades to the vacuum calibration chamber will allow for autonomous operation with failure and emergency handling procedures to protect the instruments under test from a loss of vacuum environment. The hardware upgrades allow for chamber pressures in the low 10~(-6) torr range during the operation of windowless gas discharge lamps. In addition, the upgrades provide the capability to stimulate an instrument using two sources of light simultaneously, one through a monochromater the other by direct illumination.