The Origins Space Telescope and the HEterodyne Receiver for Origins (HERO)

摘要

The Origins Space Telescope is one of four large mission concept studies carried out by NASA for the 2020 Decadal survey. Origins is a far-infrared telescope designed to understand the evolution of galaxies and black holes, to follow the trail of water from protostars to habitable planets and to search for biosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets. The Heterodyne Receiver for Origins (HERO) is the high spectral resolution receiver. It is the first heterodyne array receiver designed to fly on a satellite and an example for possible future focal plane arrays for space. HERO has focal plane arrays with nine pixels in two polarization. HERO covers a large frequency range between 486 and 2700 GHz in only 4 frequency bands, requiring local oscillators with fractional bandwidth of 45%. HERO uses the best superconducting mixers with noise temperatures between 1 and 3 hf/k and an intermediate bandwidth of 6 to 8 GHz. HERO can carry out dual polarization and dual-frequency observations. The major challenges for the HERO design are the low cooling power and the low electrical power available on a spacecraft, which impact the choice of the cryogenic amplifiers and backends. SiGe cryogenic amplifiers with a consumption of less than 0.5 mW, as well as CMOS spectrometers with a power consumption below 2W are the baseline for HERO. The development plan includes broadband (45%) multiplier-amplifier chains, low noise mixers (1-3 hf/k), low-power consuming (< 05.mW) cryogenic amplifiers and low-power consuming spectrometer backends (< 2W).