The On-orbit Performance of the Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment Mission

Abstract

We present the on-orbit performance of the Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE). CUTE is a 6U CubeSat that launched on 2021 September 27 and is obtaining near-ultraviolet (NUV; 2480 Å-3306 Å) transit spectroscopy of short-period exoplanets. The instrument comprises a 20 cm × 8 cm rectangular Cassegrain telescope, an NUV spectrograph with a holographically ruled aberration-correcting diffraction grating, and an NUV-optimized CCD detector. The telescope feeds the spectrograph through an 18′ × 60″ slit. The detector is a passively cooled, back-illuminated NUV-enhanced CCD. The spacecraft bus is a Blue Canyon Technologies XB1, which has demonstrated ≤ 6″ jitter in 56% of CUTE science exposures. Following spacecraft commissioning, an on-orbit calibration program was executed to characterize the CUTE instrument’s on-orbit performance. The results of this calibration indicate that the effective area of CUTE is ≈19.0–27.5 cm2 and that the average intrinsic resolution element is 2.9 Å across the bandpass. This paper describes the measurement of the science instrument performance parameters as well as the thermal and pointing characteristics of the observatory.