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The Infra-Red Telescope on board the THESEUS mission

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-05-29, 09:25 authored by D. Götz, O. Boulade, B. Cordier, E. L. Floc'h, F. Pinsard, J. Amiaux, T. Tourrette, S. Basa, S. Vergani, J. L. Atteia, S. Covino, G. Ghirlanda, N. Tanvir, A. Blain, P. O'Brien, A. Rossi, G. Stratta, P. G. Casella, E. Bozzo, C. Tenzer, P. Orleanski, L. Amati
The Infra-Red Telescope (IRT) on board the Transient High Energy Sky and Early Universe Surveyor (THESEUS) ESA M5 candidate mission will play a key role in identifying and characterizing moderate to high redshift Gamma-Ray Bursts afterglows. The IRT is the enabling instrument on board THESEUS for measuring autonomously the redshift of the several hundreds of GRBs detected per year by the Soft X-ray Imager (SXI) and the X- and Gamma-Ray Imaging Spectrometer (XGIS), and thus allowing the big ground based telescopes to be triggered on a redshift pre-selected sample, and finally fulfilling the cosmological goals of the mission. The IRT will be composed by a primary mirror of 0.7 m of diameter coupled to a single camera in a Cassegrain design. It will work in the 0.7-1.8 {\mu}m wavelength range, and will provide a 10x10 arc min imaging field of view with sub-arc second localization capabilities, and, at the same time, a 5x5 arc min field of view with moderate (R up to ~500) spectroscopic capabilities. Its sensitivity, mainly limited by the satellite jitter, is adapted to detect all the GRBs, localized by the SXI/XGIS, and to acquire spectra for the majority of them.

Funding

D.G. acknowledges the financial support of the UnivEarthS Labex program at Sorbonne Paris Cit´e (ANR-10-LABX-0023 and ANR-11-IDEX-0005-02)

History

Citation

Memorie della Società Astronomica Italiana (Mem.SAIt), 2018, Vol.89 n.2 pg. 148

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING/Department of Physics and Astronomy

Source

Proceedings of the THESEUS Workshop, Napoli, Italy

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

Memorie della Società Astronomica Italiana (Mem.SAIt)

Publisher

Società Astronomica Italiana

eissn

1824-016X

Copyright date

2018

Available date

2019-09-12

Publisher version

http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt890218/PDF/2018MmSAI..89..148G.pdf

Temporal coverage: start date

2017-10-05

Language

en

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