Ultraviolet spectroscopy is a powerful method used to study planetary surface composition through reflectance measurements and atmospheric composition through stellar/solar occultations, transits of other planetary bodies, and direct imaging of airglow and auroral emissions. The next generation of ultraviolet spectrographs (UVS) on board ESA’s JUICE (Jupiter icy moons explorer) and NASA’s Europa Clipper missions will perform such measurements of Jupiter and its moons in the early 2030’s. This work presents a compilation of a detailed UV stellar catalog of targets with high intensity in the 52-204 nm region with applications relevant to planetary spectroscopy. These applications include: 1) planning and simulating occultations, including calibration measurements; 2) modeling starlight illumination of dark, nightside planetary surfaces primarily lit by the sky; and 3) studying the origin of diffuse galactic UV light as mapped by existing datasets from Juno-UVS. This catalog also includes information drawn from other resources such as the international ultraviolet explorer (IUE) catalog and SIMBAD. We have constructed spectra at 0.1 nm resolution for over 80,000 targets using Kurucz models and, when available, IUE spectra. We report on our methods for producing the catalog and discuss plans for its implementation during ongoing and upcoming planetary missions.
Juno is a spacecraft in polar orbit around Jupiter, and one of its objectives is to explore the Jovian magnetosphere. Charged particles trapped along the Jovian magnetic field lines may generate auroral emission. The Juno magnetospheric payload is designed to measure the charged particle distributions in the Jovian magnetosphere while remote sensing the related UV-auroral emissions. The ultraviolet spectrograph on Juno (Juno-UVS) is a photon-counting imaging spectrograph designed to observe Jupiter’s prominent far-UV auroral emissions in the 68 to 210 nm spectral range. This work presents an improvement on the wavelength and radiometric calibration of Juno-UVS. Ground calibration measurements were reanalyzed by expanding the spectral database ultimately used to produce the instrument spectral pixel size map. This significantly improves the wavelength assignation, up to 4 nm at the longer wavelengths, compared with the previous calibration. Dedicated Juno-UVS observation sequences were made to evaluate the slit-dependent radiometric calibration, which was revised accordingly. This work highlights a slight slit-dependent variation in the radiometric calibration. An additional radiometric correction was established at wavelengths greater than 160 nm using some of UVS’s brightest recorded stellar spectra.
The Juno Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Juno-UVS) is a remote-sensing science instrument onboard the Juno spacecraft that has been in polar orbit around Jupiter since July 2016. Juno-UVS measures photon events in the ultraviolet from 68 to 210 nm. It is primarily used to observe emission from the Jovian aurorae but is also sensitive to other sources, such as UV-bright stars, sky background Lyman-alpha emission, and reflected sunlight. However, Juno-UVS is also sensitive to the effects of penetrating high-energy radiation, which results in elevated count rates as measured by the instrument detector array. This radiation presents a challenge for efficiently planning the acquisition of mission science data, as data volume is a valuable (and finite) resource that can quickly be filled when the spacecraft periodically passes through regions of high radiation. This background radiation has been found to vary significantly on both short (spacecraft spin-modulated) timescales, as well as longer timescales from minutes to hours during each close approach to Jupiter. This variability has required a multipronged approach in the operation planning of hardware (such as, dynamic instrument voltage adjustment) as well as onboard software (such as, utilizing data quality factors for the selective storage of science data). We present an overview of these current mitigation/optimization techniques and planning strategies used for this instrument, which will likely also be useful for the development and operations of future instruments within high radiation space environments (e.g., the ESA JUICE mission or NASA’s Europa Clipper).
The Juno Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Juno-UVS) is a remote-sensing science instrument onboard the Juno spacecraft that has been in polar orbit around Jupiter since July 2016. Juno-UVS measures photon events in the ultraviolet from about 68 to 210 nm. It is primarily used to observe emission from the Jovian aurorae, but is also sensitive to other sources such as UV-bright stars, sky background Lyman-alpha emission, and reflected sunlight. However, Juno-UVS is also sensitive to the effects of penetrating high-energy radiation, which results in elevated count rates as measured by the instrument detector array. This radiation presents a challenge for efficiently planning the acquisition of mission science data, as data volume is a valuable (and finite) resource that can quickly be filled when the spacecraft periodically passes through regions of high radiation. This background radiation has been found to vary significantly on both short (spacecraft spin-modulated) time scales, as well as longer timescales from minutes to hours during each close approach to Jupiter. This variability has required a multi-pronged approach in the operation planning of hardware (such as dynamic instrument voltage adjustment) as well as onboard software (such as utilizing data quality factors for the selective storage of science data). We present an overview of these current mitigation/optimization techniques and planning strategies used for this instrument, which will likely also be useful for the development and operations of future instruments within high radiation space environments (e.g., the ESA JUICE mission or NASA’s Europa Clipper).
We describe the stray and scattered light properties of the Juno Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Juno-UVS). Juno-UVS is a modest-powered (9.0 W) instrument that is designed to characterize Jupiter’s auroral emissions and relate them to in situ measurements made by Juno’s particle and wave instruments. A notable scattered light feature has been discovered during UVS operations; a minor solar glint that reveals itself during specific spacecraft orientations when the spin axis is pointed a certain angle away from the sun. This scattered light feature has become more important now that the Juno mission has decided to stay in its 53-day parking orbit instead of transitioning to the planned 14-day science orbit. The impact of the scattered light feature on future instrument operations is discussed.
The Juno mission is a NASA New Frontiers mission, orbiting Jupiter since 4 July 2016 and placed on a 53-day period, highly elliptical, polar orbit. The Ultraviolet Spectrograph onboard Juno (Juno-UVS) is a photoncounting imaging spectrograph, designed to cover the 68-210 nm spectral range.1 This range includes the H2 bands and the Lyman series produced in Jupiter’s far-ultraviolet (FUV) auroras. The purpose of Juno-UVS is to study Jupiter’s auroras from the unique vantage point above both poles allowed by Juno’s orbit, and to provide a wider auroral context for the in-situ particle and field instruments on Juno. Because of the 2 rpm spin of Juno, UVS nominally observes 7.5°x360° swaths of the sky during each spin of the spacecraft. The spatial resolutions along the slit and across the slit, i.e. in the spin direction, are respectively 0.16° and 0.2° , while the filled-slit spectral resolution is ∼1.3 nm.2 UVS borrows heavily from previous instruments led by Southwest Research Institute (New-Horizons and Rosetta Alices, LRO-LAMP), major improvements are: (i) an extensive radiation shielding; (ii) a scan mirror which allows targeting specific auroral features; and (iii) an improved cross-delay line readout scheme of the microchannel plate (MCP) detector. The ability offered by the scan mirror combined with Juno’s spin allows UVS access to half of the sky during every spacecraft rotation. This pointing flexibility, combined with the changing spin-axis of the spacecraft since launch, has allowed UVS to map 99 % of the sky in the 68-210 nm range. This paper describes the substantial number of spectra that have been used to monitor the health of the instrument over the course of the mission. More than 5800 spectra of mainly O, A, and B spectral-type stars in the V-magnitude range of ∼0-7 have been extracted to date. Selected stars among this list are used to calibrate the UVS instrument. This paper describes how previous spectral databases from the International Ultraviolet Explorer have been refined and adapted for UVS’ calibration purposes, in combination with observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. The retrieved effective area of the instrument peaks around 0.28 at ∼125 nm, with uncertainties lower than 10%.
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