The KASINICS (Korea Astronomy and Space science Institute Near Infrared Camera System) is a ground-based near-infrared (NIR) imaging instrument. KASINICS has offner relay optics to reduce unwanted infrared light. For the offner optics, we adopted an ultra precision machining process which is installed at KBSI (Korea Basics Science research Institute). Since the offner relay optics is made of aluminum 6061 metal material, we did several tests to reach the specification. We found that a 0.497mm radius nose bite and 220m/min machining speed are best tool and condition to make this offner optics with the precision machine. In this paper, we report the technical method of ultra precision machining and results of the KASINICS offner optics.

We have developed a control electronics system for an infrared detector array of KASINICS (KASI Near Infrared Camera System), which is a new ground-based instrument of the Korea Astronomy and Space science Institute (KASI). Equipped with a 512×512 InSb array (ALADDIN III Quadrant, manufactured by Raytheon) sensitive from 1 to 5μm, KASINICS will be used at J, H, Ks, and L-bands. The controller consists of DSP(Digital Signal Processor), Bias, Clock, and Video boards which are installed on a single VME-bus backplane. TMS320C6713DSP, FPGA(Field Programmable Gate Array), and 384-MB SDRAM(Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory) are included in the DSP board. DSP board manages entire electronics system, generates digital clock patterns and communicates with a PC using USB 2.0 interface. The clock patterns are downloaded from a PC and stored on the FPGA. UART is used for the communication with peripherals. Video board has 4 channel ADC which converts video signal into 16-bit digital numbers. Two video boards are installed on the controller for ALADDIN array. The Bias board provides 16 dc bias voltages and the Clock board has 15 clock channels. We have also coded a DSP firmware and a test version of control software in C-language. The controller is flexible enough to operate a wide range of IR array and CCD. Operational tests of the controller have been successfully finished using a test ROIC (Read-Out Integrated Circuit).

The KASINICS (KASI Near Infrared Camera System) is a ground-based Near-Infrared (NIR) imaging instrument developed by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). In this paper, we report the test results of the KASINICS camera optics system which is comprised of a 1-1 Offner relay. We measure that the surface RMS fluctuations of the Offner mirrors are at the level of 10−1−10−2 of the target wavelengths, showing that the mirrors are sufficiently smooth for NIR observations. The alignment of the Offner optics system has been checked too. Our ray-tracing simulations find that the image quality should not degrade more than the pixel size of the KASINICS ( 40μm), if a de-centering or a tilt of the Offner mirrors are within 5mm, or 2.5° . Our measurement shows that the de-centering or the tilt of the Offner mirrors are less than 1 mm or 0.5° , assuring that the KASINICS image quality are not affected by the alignment errors. We have also measured that the optics resolution is 20μm and it does not degrade more than 10% over the detector surface area of 14.3 mm / times 14.3mm. Overall, we conclude that the KASINICS optics system satisfies the design requirements for NIR imaging observations.

A Korean team (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Korea Basic Science Institute, and Kyung Hee University) takes part in an international cooperation project called CIBER (Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment), which has begun with Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in USA and Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in Japan. CIBER is a rocket-borne instrument, of which the scientific goal is to measure the cosmic near-infrared extra-galactic background to search for signatures of primordial galaxy formation. CIBER consists of a wide-field two-color camera, a low-resolution absolute spectrometer, and a high-resolution narrow-band imaging spectrometer. The Korean team is in charge of the ground support electronics and manufacturing of optical parts of the narrow-band spectrometer, which will provide excellent opportunities for science and technology to Korean infrared groups.

The reimaging optics of the KASINICS (KASI Near Infrared Camera System) includes many transparent components like an entrance window, band-pass filters, and blocking filters. As observational targets or in-field background objects, bright stars may cause optical ghosts that can significantly degrade the system performance of the KASINICS. We estimated analytically the relative brightness of ghost components with respect to a point source and examined the effects of tilting optical components as a method of suppressing ghosts. We also performed numerical ray tracings including all the optical components and found the results are consistent with those of the analytic estimations. We conclude that the KASINICS will not suffer from significant ghost effects with appropriate anti-reflection coatings and fittings for the optical components.

KASI (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute) is developing the near-infrared camera system named KASINICS (KASI Near-Infrared Camera System) which will be installed at the 60cm f/13.5 Ritchey-Chretien telescope of the Sobaeksan Optical Astronomy Observatory (SOAO). The camera system is optimized for JHKL bands and has a 6 arcmin FOV. The optical system consists of two spherical mirrors and a 8-position filter wheel. With the exception for the dewar window, all optical elements are cooled inside cryogenic dewar. Since the Offner system is adopted to prevent thermal noises from outside of the telescope primary mirror, the secondary mirror of the Offner system acts as a cold Lyot stop. The optical performance does not change by temperature variations because the Aluminum mirrors contract and expand homogeneously with its mount. We finished the design and fabrication of the optical parts and are now aligning the optical system. We plan to have a test observation on 2006 January.

We have developed a tool for measuring optical aberrations of telescope. We adopt curvature sensing technique and use the least square method for finding the amplitudes of the Zernike polynomials. This tool runs under the PC Linux system and the PC windows system with Linux emulators such as Cygwin. The program for UNIX system is used for optical alignment of 1.8M optical telescope at the Bohyunsan Optical Astronomical Observatory (BOAO) and the PC based program is used for the Korea Astronomy Observatory (KAO) wide field telescope (named NEOPAT-3). Our tool is found to be efficient for precise measurement of the optical aberrations of telescopes.

An imaging spectrograph concept optimized for extended far-ultraviolet emission sources is presented. Although the design was originally developed for FIMS aboard the first Korean science satellite STSAT-l launched on September 27, 2003, no rigorous theoretical background of the spectrograph design has been published. The spectrograph design employs an off-axis parabolic cylinder mirror in front of a slit that guides lights to a diffraction grating. The concave grating provides moderate spatial resolution over a large field of view. This mapping capability is absent in most astronomical instruments but is crucial to the understanding of the nature of a variety of astrophysical phenomena. The aberration theory presented in this paper can be extended to holographic gratings in order to improve the spatial as well as the spectral resolutions.