End-to-end ground calibration and in-flight performance of the FIREBall-2 instrument
astro-ph.IM
/ Authors
Vincent Picouet, Bruno Milliard, Gillian Kyne, Didier Vibert, David Schiminovich, Christopher Martin, Erika Hamden, Keri Hoadley, Johan Montel, Nicole Melso
and 11 more authors
Donal OSullivan, Jean Evrard, Etienne Perot, Robert Grange, Shouleh Nikzad, Philippe Balard, Patrick Blanchard, Frederi Mirc, Nicolas Bray, April Jewell, Samuel Quiret
/ Abstract
The payload of the Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon (FIREBall-2), the second generation of the FIREBall instrument (PI: C. Martin, Caltech), has been calibrated and launched from the NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility (CSBF) in Fort Sumner, NM. FIREBall-2 was launched for the first time on the 22nd September 2018, and the payload performed the very first multi-object acquisition from space using a multi-object slit spectrograph (MOS). This performance-oriented paper presents the calibration and last ground adjustments of FIREBall-2, the in-flight performance assessed based on the flight data, and the predicted instrument's ultimate sensitivity. This analysis predicts that future flights of FIREBall-2 should be able to detect the HI Lyαresonance line in galaxies at z~0.67, but will find it challenging to spatially resolve the circumgalactic medium (CGM).