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C. Gronwall (PSU), A.A. Breeveld (MSSL), S.D. Hunsberger, M.V. Ivanushkina, P.W.A. Roming (PSU), E. Auden, A.J. Blustin, C.H. James, K.E. McGowan, M. de Pasquale, T. Poole, S.R. Rosen (MSSL), P.T. Boyd, S.T. Holland, W.B. Landsman, M.D. Still (GSFC)
The UV/Optical telescope (UVOT) aboard the Swift Gamma-ray Burst Observatory is a 30-cm aperture f/12.7 telescope with a wide (17{\tt '} \times 17{\tt '}) field-of-view, and a micro-channel plate detector capable of detecting photons in the range from 170 to 600 nm. The instrument can be used for either photometry or spectroscopy, and carries a white light filter, a 4\times field magnifier, UV and optical grisms, 3 broadband optical filters (UBV), two broadband UV filters (centered at 180~nm and 260~nm), and a narrow UV filter centered at 220~nm. In white light, the UVOT has a 5\sigma sensitivity to a limiting magnitude of B=24 in 1000s. In its grism mode, the instrument will be able to perform low-resolution (R ~300) spectroscopy on targets down to B ~17. The principal uses of UVOT will be to obtain accurate (0{\tt ''}\mskip -7.6mu.\, 3) positions for the gamma-ray bursts, detect the early (~100) optical afterglows, monitor the photometric decline of their afterglows, and obtain spectroscopic and photometric redshifts for gamma-ray bursts.
We discuss the plans and status of the on-orbit calibration of the telescope, including measurements of the image quality, field distortion, photometric and spectroscopic response, and flat-field response.
This work is sponsored at Penn State by NASA's Office of Space Science through contract NAS5-00136 and at MSSL by funding from PPARC.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: caryl@astro.psu.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.