Design and development of IR camera

Abstract

Atmospheric turbulence is gentle in the infrared regime than visible. Hence adaptive optics (AO) efficiently works in the infrared. The large overheads and low efficiency still limit the applicability of AO on large telescopes for which operational costs per unit time are high. On the other hand, small and medium-sized telescopes are many more in number, and their operational costs are substantially lower. A reasonably powerful AO system, which works with minimal overheads and provides good sky coverage, will greatly enhance the scientific capabilities of small and medium-sized telescopes. Robotic Adaptive Optics (Robo-AO) is an AO system for medium-sized telescopes which is built by Caltech, USA, and IUCAA, India collaboratively. It works with minimal overheads and provides good sky coverage in both visible and infrared regime. The first version of Robo-AO does not have a high-quality IR camera. An IR camera is being developed to accommodate AO-corrected 1.5 0 field of view in near-infrared bands. It can be used as a science camera as well as a tip-tilt camera. It is being built at IUCAA with a HAWAII detector. Here we describe the salient features of the IR camera like optics, optomechanical design, etc.