Title:

Alignment Monitoring System for the Hard X-Ray Balloon-Borne Telescope SuperHERO

The balloon-borne X-ray telescope SuperHERO aims to image the Crab Nebula in the hard X-ray region with an unprecedented angular resolution of 10 arcseconds. During flight, SuperHERO will be susceptible to angular deflections due to truss bending, thermal expansion, and thermal contraction, all of which will cause source blurring in the final image of the Crab. To mitigate the source blurring, SuperHERO is implementing the Alignment Monitoring System (AMS) which will track the angular deflections of the truss during flight. To do this, the AMS is using four cameras to take images of LED patterns located at each Mirror Module Assembly (MMA) and Detector Unit Assembly (DUA), then analyzing these images with on-flight code to find the LED patterns' reconstructed center points, which will then be compared to the pre-flight center points to find their displacement during flight. With this project, the AMS has achieved high spatial resolution for imaging of the LED patterns, the design of the camera mounts and LED patterns, the preliminary image analysis code, and several methods to improve image analysis for cases when the sun shines directly on the LEDs.

Name

Comment*

Comments are viewable only by submitter

Captcha*