China’s Lunar Telescope: Alive and Well

Among the instruments operating for the past two years aboard China’s Chang’e 3 lunar lander is a UV telescope. This report documents the first 18 months of operations.
18-Months Operation of Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope: A Highly Stable Photometric Performance

J. Wang, X. M. Meng, X. H. Han, H. B. Cai, L. Cao, J. S. Deng, Y. L. Qiu, S. Wang, J. Y. Wei, J. Y. Hu (Submitted on 6 Oct 2015)

We here report the photometric performance of Lunar-based Ultraviolet telescope (LUT), the first robotic telescope working on the Moon, for its 18-months operation. In total, 17 IUE standards have been observed in 51 runs until June 2015, which returns a highly stable photometric performance during the past 18 months (i.e., no evolution of photometric performance with time). The magnitude zero point is determined to be 17.53±0.05 mag, which is not only highly consistent with the results based on its first 6-months operation, but also independent on the spectral type of the standard from which the magnitude zero point is determined. The implications of this stable performance is discussed, and is useful for next generation lunar-based astronomical observations.

Comments: 6 pages, 3 figures and 2 tables. To be published in Ap&SS
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:1510.01435 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1510.01435v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Jing Wang [view email]
[v1] Tue, 6 Oct 2015 05:30:53 GMT (58kb)

Research paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01435