EGU2020-20425
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20425
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

A customizable wide field-of-view multiband imager for lunar atmospheric Studies

Supriya Chakrabarti1, Sunip Mukherjee1, Timothy Cook1, and Jeffrey Baumgardner2
Supriya Chakrabarti et al.
  • 1University of Massachusetts, Lowell, Lowell Center for Space Sciene and Technology, Lowell, United States of America (supriya_chakrabarti@uml.edu)
  • 2Center for Space Physics, Boston University, Boston, United States of America

Ground based observations have indicated that at times the lunar Sodium atmosphere extends beyond the Earth. However, to date no experiment has been conducted to perform an extended duration, in-situ observation of the lunar atmosphere.  We have designed a small (10 × 10 × 10 cmand a mass of 1.3 Kg), multi-band imager that operates in the CCD-band (approximately, 450 – 900 nm). The instrument is easily tailored to meet a specific application by selecting the appropriate combination of interference filters. If such an instrument is placed on a lunar orbiting platform, it will generate a long-term database to study the morphology of the lunar atmosphere or surface features observable in this band.

The instrument has an angular resolution of 0.1and a field of view of 35× 25. This large field of view is shared by a mosaic of interference filters chosen for a specific application. The instrument uses a custom-designed computer program for automatic exposure control and communicates using standard serial and ethernet protocols.

This design has been validated using commercial off-the-shelf components for sodium and potassium resonance emissions at 589 nm and 770 nm, respectively.

How to cite: Chakrabarti, S., Mukherjee, S., Cook, T., and Baumgardner, J.: A customizable wide field-of-view multiband imager for lunar atmospheric Studies, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-20425, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20425, 2020

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