Abstract Details
| Name: Mudit Srivastava Affiliation: PRL, Ahmedabad Conference ID: ASI2019_225 Title : The Development of Mt. Abu Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera - Pathfinder (MFOSC-P) for PRL 1.2m Mt. Abu Telescope Authors and Co-Authors : Mudit K. Srivastava, Mohan Lal, Vipin Kumar, Ankita Patel, Vaibhav Dixit, S.N. Mathur, B.S. Munjal (SAC-ISRO), Hemant Arora (SAC-ISRO) and Tejas Mavani (SAC-ISRO) Abstract Type : Oral Abstract Category : Instrumentation and Techniques Abstract : Mt. Abu Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera-Pathfinder (MFOSC-P) is soon to be commissioned instrument on PRL 1.2m Optical-Near Infrared Telescope at Mt. Abu. Envisioned as a pathfinder for a bigger and more complex next generation instrument on upcoming PRL 2.5m telescope, MFOSC-P has been fully designed and developed in-house. It offers options for both the imaging as well spectroscopy within the same optical chain in visible waveband (4500-8500 angstroms). The optics has been designed to provide seeing limited imaging in astronomy standard Bessell’s B, V, R and I filters. Three modes of spectroscopy with resolutions (lambda/delta_lambda) 2000, 1000 and 500 around 6500, 5200 and 6500 angstroms are achieved with three plane reflection gratings. Opto-mechanical system of the instrument had been designed and successfully evaluated for its structural integrity using finite element analysis prior to its fabrication. The motion and other control aspects of the instrument are being taken care by an in-house developed control system based on off-the-shelf motion controllers and stepper driver modules and using Python-Qt based open source software. MFOSC-P is currently going through its assembly-integration-testing (AIT) phase in the laboratory and has been successfully verified for its image quality. Two posters presentations are requested by concerned team members in the ASI-2019 that would illustrate the detailed designs of various sub-systems of the instrument, AIT procedures and results of various characterization tests. However a talk is requested here to present the overall design, development, characterization, commissioning and scientific aspects of the instrument to the astronomy community as MFOSC-P has a great potential to be replicated on various 1-2 m class of telescopes in the country as a general purpose user's instrument with quick development cycle and limited financial budget. |