Previous
abstract 
Next
abstract
Session 73 - Solar Space Observations, SOHO & SERTS.
Display session, Friday, January 09
Exhibit Hall,
The Solar EUV Rocket Telescope and Spectrograph (SERTS) obtains imaged high-resolution spectra of individual solar features, providing information about the Sun's corona and upper transition region. We have recently carried out a complete end-to-end calibration of the instrument to determine its absolute radiometric response over the full bandpass of 300 -- 365 ÅThe measurements were done at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in England, using the same vacuum facility and EUV radiation source used in the pre-flight calibration of the Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer (CDS) experiment now flying aboard the SOHO spacecraft. For our SERTS project, the unique radiation source provided by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Germany was re-calibrated to an absolute accuracy of 7% (1\sigma) at 12 wavelengths covering our bandpass directly against the Berlin electron storage ring BESSY, which is a primary radiometric source standard. Scans of the SERTS aperture over a range of pitch and yaw angles were made to determine the instrument's absolute spectral sensitivity to \le 25%, considering all sources of error. These results will be matched against prior calibrations which relied on combining measurements of individual optical components, and on comparisons with theoretically predicted `insensitive' line ratios. The recent measurements at RAL also give information about the uniformity of illumination across the collimated source beam, as well as about polarization characteristics of both the instrument and radiation source, which may prove helpful in correctly interpreting the original CDS calibration data.
We hope to repeat such calibration measurements and to provide future SERTS flights annually, at least throughout the duration of the SOHO mission. Coordinated observing programs would then allow these updated absolute calibrations to be transferred on a regular basis to several of the instruments onboard SOHO, including CDS, EIT, and CELIAS.
