Abstract Details

Name: Mohanlal Jangra
Affiliation: PRL, Ahmedabad
Conference ID: ASI2019_134
Title : Mt Abu Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera-Pathfinder(MFOSC-P) on PRL 1.2m Telescope: Opto-Mechanical and Control System Design
Authors and Co-Authors : Mohanlal Jangra, Ankita Patel, Vaibhav Dixit, S.N. Mathur, B.S. Munjal(SAC-ISRO), Hemant Arora(SAC-ISRO), Tejas Mavani(SAC-ISRO), Vipin Kumar and Mudit K. Srivastava
Abstract Type : Poster
Abstract Category : Instrumentation and Techniques
Abstract : Mt. Abu Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera-Pathfinder (MFOSC-P) is an upcoming instrument on PRL 1.2m telescope at Mt. Abu. MFOSC-P is designed to provide seeing limited imaging in Bessell's B,V, R and I filters over the field of view of ~6X6 arc-min^2. Slit limited resolutions of 2000, 1000 and 500 around 6500, 5200 and 6500 angstroms would be provided using three plane reflection gratings. The instrument has been designed fully in-house including its optical, mechanical, electronics motion control system and user's interface software, while commercially available off-the-shelf ANDOR 1KX1K CCD camera system is used as the detector. The main optics of the instrument is designed as three lens elements collimator and five lens elements camera sections. These lenses have been fabricated by external manufacturers and later assembled in to in-house designed and developed lens mounts, barrels, and cage-rod system as per the design requirements of optical alignment, to ensure the desired image quality. Five movable sub-systems of the instrument (gratings/imaging fold mirror, filter wheel, slits/open aperture unit, calibration fold mirror and auto-guider optics) are being driven by the stepper motors. These sub-systems are finally assembled into an instrument enclosure chassis to be fixed on the telescope with additional support structure. Various motions controls aspects of the instrument and calibration lamps operations are controlled by an in-house developed electronic control system and graphical user's interface. The control system has been developed around commercially available stepper motor controllers and drivers modules. It can facilitate the operations of up to eight stepper motors along with its encoders/limits feedbacks and four calibration lamps. The user's interface is developed using open source Python-QT software. MFOSC-P is currently being assembled is the laboratory and has been successfully verified for its image quality. We shall be reporting on the various design aspects of MFOSC-P in the meeting.