Motivating a reconfigurable UV spectrograph for planetary observations: UMIS concept and prototype progress

Le résumé fourni par la source

The ultraviolet regime provides critical insights into rapidly evolving processes throughout the solar system, including vapor plumes, auroral emissions, and exosphere interactions. Long-slit spectrographs flown on past missions have been essential for these discoveries, enabling detailed spectral characterization of planets, moons, and comets for decades. However, by design they sample (mostly) one spatial dimension at a time, which can limit observational efficiency for phenomena that change on short timescales or span extended regions. The Ultraviolet Micromirror Imaging Spectrograph (UMIS) aims to address this limitation by introducing ultraviolet integral-field spectroscopy to planetary science. UMIS replaces the fixed narrow slit with a reconfigurable micromirror array that functions as a programmable “pseudo-slit,” enabling simultaneous acquisition of hundreds of spatially separated spectra across a wide field of view. Light not directed toward the spectrograph is preserved to form a contextual UV image, allowing both imaging and spectroscopy to occur in parallel. The Bright Silicon Technologies micromirror device consists of a 20 × 20 array of individually steerable mirrors, each capable of deflecting up to 15 degrees toward one of several gratings mapped to distinct detector regions. This architecture provides tunable spatial sampling matched to the target’s morphology and science requirements, while maintaining compatibility with traditional spectrograph designs. In these proceedings we present the scientific motivations driving UMIS development and provide a status update on instrument progress, focusing on the calibration and characterization of a 32-element prototype micromirror device currently under evaluation at the University of Colorado.

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