The FGS is one of two scientific instruments on board the ESA ARIEL space telescope, which ESA plans to launch in 2029. The aim of the mission is to characterize the atmospheres of several hundred different exoplanets. The FGS is an opto-electronic instrument – a photometer and a near infra-red spectrometer. Although FGS stands for Fine Guidance System, in fact it has two main goals: to deliver scientific data of observed exoplanets, precisely speaking, their atmospheres, and to support the spacecraft’s AOCS with very precise pointing and guiding towards observation objects. This paper presents an overview of the current FGS design and implementation. The instrument is in the middle step between successfully passed iPDR and upcoming iCDR. Up to now, the team successfully built a prototype of the instrument, and is working on the manufacturing of the engineering and engineering-qualification models.
KEYWORDS: Field programmable gate arrays, Electronics, Data processing, Power supplies, Image processing, Infrared imaging, Space telescopes, Exoplanets, Infrared spectroscopy, Photometry
ARIEL is an ESA mission whose scientific goal is to investigate exoplanetary atmospheres. The payload is composed by two instruments: AIRS (ARIEL IR Spectrometer) and FGS (Fine Guidance System). The FGS detection chain is composed by two HgCdTe detectors and by the cold Front End Electronics (SIDECAR), kept at cryogenic temperatures, interfacing with the F-DCU (FGS Detector Control Unit) boards that we will describe thoroughly in this paper. The F-DCU are situated in the warm side of the payload in a box called FCU (FGS Control Unit) and contribute to the FGS VIS/NIR imaging and NIR spectroscopy. The F-DCU performs several tasks: drives the detectors, processes science data and housekeeping telemetries, manages the commands exchange between the FGS/DPU (Data Processing Unit) and the SIDECARs and provides high quality voltages to the detectors. This paper reports the F-DCU status, describing its architecture, the operation and the activities, past and future necessary for its development.
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