The Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI) is a single sky-pixel, high-resolution (>300.000), spectrometer for ESA's Herschel Space Observatory. The instrument is designed to provide a wide and continuous frequency coverage with a velocity resolved resolution and a high sensitivity. This allows detailed investigations of a wide variety of astronomical sources, ranging from solar system objects, star formation regions to nuclei of galaxies. The frequency bands cover many emission and absorption lines of molecules, like H/sub 2/O, and atomic and ionic lines, like CII, NII. The instrument comprises of 5 frequency bands covering 480-150 GHz with SIS mixers and a sixth dual band for the 1410-1910 GHz range with Hot Electron Bolometer Mixers. The Local Oscillator (LO) subsystem consists of a Ka-band synthesiser followed by 14 chains of frequency multipliers, 2 for each frequency band. Each frequency band has two mixers operating on orthogonal polarisations. All mixers are designed to have a noise performance close to the quantum noise limit. One frequency band is operated at a time. Modular design of the Focal Plane Unit, with a common optical path for all the mixer bands, and of the Local Oscillator Unit with a common LO Source Unit for all the LO chains, make the instrument very compact. A pair of Auto-Correlators and a pair of Acousto-Optic spectrometers process the two IF signals from the dual-polarisation front-ends and provide instantaneous frequency coverage of 4 GHz, resulting in a set of resolutions (140 KHz to 1 MHz), better than <0.1 Km/s. The instrument development is in an advanced state with mixers and LO chains approaching aimed performance.


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    Title :

    The Herschel-Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI)


    Contributors:
    de Graauw, T. (author) / Caux, E. (author) / Gusten, R. (author) / Jellema, W. (author) / Luinge, W. (author) / Pearson, J. (author) / Phillips, T. (author) / Schieder, R. (author) / Stutzki, J. (author) / Wafelbakker, K. (author)


    Publication date :

    2004-01-01


    Size :

    177918 byte




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



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