Prospect for UV observations from the Moon. III. Assembly and ground calibration of Lunar Ultraviolet Cosmic Imager (LUCI)

Joice Mathew*, B. G. Nair, Margarita Safonova, S. Sriram, Ajin Prakash, Mayuresh Sarpotdar, S. Ambily, K. Nirmal, A. G. Sreejith, Jayant Murthy, P. U. Kamath, S. Kathiravan, B. R. Prasad, Noah Brosch, Norbert Kappelmann, Nirmal Suraj Gadde, Rahul Narayan

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The Lunar Ultraviolet Cosmic Imager (LUCI) is a near-ultraviolet (NUV) telescope with all-spherical mirrors, designed and built to fly as a scientific payload on a lunar mission with Team Indus—the original Indian entry to the Google Lunar X-Prize. Observations from the Moon provide a unique opportunity of a stable platform with an unobstructed view of the space at all wavelengths due to the absence of atmosphere and ionosphere. LUCI is an 80 mm aperture telescope, with a field of view of 27.6 × 20.4 and a spatial resolution of 5 , will scan the sky in the NUV (200–320 nm) domain to look for transient sources. We describe here the assembly, alignment, and calibration of the complete instrument. LUCI is now in storage in a class 1000 clean room and will be delivered to our flight partner in readiness for flight.

Original languageEnglish
Article number53
JournalAstrophysics and Space Science
Volume364
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2019
Externally publishedYes

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