First light galaxies have predictable linear clustering, and are expected to produce fluctuations with a characteristic spatial power spectrum, which peaks at an angular scale of ~ 10 arcminutes and in the 1―2 μm spectral regions. The Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment 2 (CIBER2) is a dedicated sounding rocket mission for measuring the fluctuations in the extragalactic infrared background light, following up the previous successful measurements of CIBER1. With a 28.5 cm telescope accompanied with three arms of camera barrels and a dual broadband filter on each H2RG (λc = 2.5 μm) array, CIBER2 can measure 6 bands of wide field (1.1 × 2.2 degrees) up to 3 AB magnitudes deeper than CIBER1. This project is leaded by California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, collaborating internationally with Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan, Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Korea Basic Science Institute, and Seoul National University. The Korean team is in charge of 1) one H2RG scientific array, 2) ground station hardware and software, 3) telescope lenses, and 4) flight and test bed electronics fabrication. In this paper, we describe the detailed activities of the Korean participation as well as the current status of the CIBER2 project.

We report a search for fluctuations of the sky brightness toward the North Ecliptic Pole with AKARI, at 2.4, 3.2, and 4.1 μm . The stacked images with a diameter of 10 arcminutes of the AKARI-Monitor Field show a spatial structure on the scale of a few hundred arcseconds. A power spectrum analysis shows that there is a significant excess fluctuation at angular scales larger than 100 arcseconds that cannot be explained by zodiacal light, diffuse Galactic light, shot noise of faint galaxies, or clustering of low-redshift galaxies. These findings indicate that the detected fluctuation could be attributed to the first stars of the universe, i.e., Population III stars.

MIRIS, Multi-purpose Infra-Red Imaging System, is the main payload of STSAT-3 (Korea Science & Technology Satellite 3), which will be launched in the end of 2012 (the exact date to be determined) by a Russian Dnepr rocket. MIRIS consists of two camera systems, SOC (Space Observation Camera) and EOC (Earth Observation Camera). During a shock test for the flight model stability in the launching environment, some lenses of SOC EQM (Engineering Qualification Model) were broken. In order to resolve the lens failure, analyses for cause were performed with visual inspections for lenses and opto-mechanical parts. After modifications of SOC opto-mechanical parts, the shock test was performed again and passed. In this paper, we introduce the solution for lens safety and report the test results.