GREAT: the SOFIA high-frequency heterodyne instrument

By S. Heyminck, U. Graf, R. Gusten, J. Stutzki, H. Hubers, Paul Hartogh. 2012

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe the design and construction of GREAT (German REceiver for Astronomy at Terahertz frequencies) operated on the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). GREAT is a modular dual-color heterodyne instrument for highresolution far-infrared (FIR) spectroscopy. Selected for SOFIA’s Early Science demonstration, the instrument has successfully performed three Short and more than a dozen Basic Science flights since first light was recorded on its April 1, 2011 commissioning flight. We report on the in-flight performance and operation of the receiver that – in various flight configurations, with three different detector channels – observed in several science-defined frequency windows between 1.25 and 2.5 THz. The receiver optics was verified to be diffraction-limited as designed, with nominal efficiencies; receiver sensitivities are state-of-the-art, with excellent system stability. The modular design allows for the continuous integration of latest technologies; we briefly discuss additional channels under development and ongoing improvements for Cycle 1 observations. GREAT is a principal investigator instrument, developed by a consortium of four German research institutes, available to the SOFIA users on a collaborative basis.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e53ad29e9bd93c3bf0ba2065deeafaeaebb83b36

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Pineda
2. W. Langer
3. Paul F. Goldsmith
4. Thirukumaran Velusamy
5. Ralf Klessen
6. S. Glover
7. Mark R. Krumholz
8. M. Heyer

In Atmospheric Science

1. J. Pineda
2. Paul F. Goldsmith
3. Ralf Klessen
4. S. Glover
5. P. Caselli

In Spectroscopy

1. J. Pineda
2. W. Langer
3. Paul F. Goldsmith
4. Thirukumaran Velusamy
5. M. Heyer

Citations in the corpus

• COLLISIONAL EXCITATION OF THE [C ii] FINE STRUCTURE TRANSITION IN INTERSTELLAR CLOUDS (2012, methodology): “Such data for Galactic sources have been extremely rare, and only with the HIFI instrument on Herschel (de Graauw et al. 2010) and the GREAT instrument on SOFIA (Heyminck et al. 2012) have high spectral resolution observations of [C ii] become available to the astronomical community.”