Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System - CaSSIS

FPA Attached to Telescope

The FPA is now attached to the telescope. The mechanical alignment and focussing procedure are ...

... starting now.
And here we have the first image from the flight model system (telescope and detector).
The little spot is the pinhole of our collimator. It shows that the instrument is close to but not quite in focus. We also confirmed a prediction about the misalignment between the optical axis of the telescope and the optical axis of the collimator. We can now move towards optimizing the system. Will probably take a couple of days to do that. We have now just confirmed that the asymmetry in the PSF you see occurs when the detector is not in the focal plane. When we shift the position to get a focus, we get a nice round spot. Now we start getting the detector to the correct position before locking it in place.