2000•Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIERequires access
In-flight performance of the Very high Angular resolution ULtraviolet Telescope sounding rocket payload
C. M. Korendyke, A. Vourlidas, J. W. Cook, K. P. Dere, Ronen Feldman, R. A. Howard, D. N. Lilley, J. S. Morrill, J. D. Moses, N. Moulton, Robert W. Moye, David E. Roberts, Ed Shepler, J. K. Smith, D. G. Socker, T. Spears, R. S. Waymire, Wayne E. Brown, T. D. Tarbell, Tom Berger, B. N. Handy
Open publisher page 1 citations
Abstract
The Very high Angular Resolution ULtraviolet Telescope experiment was successfully launched on May 7, 1999 on a Black Brant sounding rocket vehicle from White Sands Missile Range. The instrument consists of a 30 cm UV diffraction limited telescope followed by a double grating spectroheliograph tuned to isolate the solar Lyman (alpha) emission line. During the flight, the instrument successfully obtained a series of images of the upper chromosphere with a limiting resolution of approximately 0.33 arc-seconds. The resulting observations are the highest resolution images of the solar atmosphere obtained from space to date. The flight demonstrated that subarc-second ultraviolet images of the solar atmosphere are achievable with a high quality, moderate aperture space telescope and associated optics. Herein, we describe the payload and its in- flight performance.