Dr Anthony Brown anthony.brown@durham.ac.uk
Assistant Professor
Inter-calibration of atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes with UAV-based airborne calibration system
Brown, Anthony M.; Muller, Jacques; de Naurois, Mathieu; Clark, Paul
Authors
Jacques Muller
Mathieu de Naurois
Paul Clark
Abstract
The recent advances in the flight capability of remotely piloted aerial vehicles (here after referred to as UAVs) have afforded the astronomical community the possibility of a new telescope calibration technique: UAV-based calibration. Building upon a feasibility study which characterised the potential that a UAV-based calibration system has for the future Cherenkov Telescope Array, we created a first-generation UAV-calibration prototype and undertook a field-campaign of inter-calibrating the sensitivity of the H.E.S.S. telescope array with two successful calibration flights. In this paper we report the key results of our first test campaign: firstly, by comparing the intensity of the UAV-calibration events, as recorded by the individual HESS-I cameras, we find that a UAV-based inter-calibration is consistent with the standard muon inter-calibration technique at the level of \SI{5.4}{\%} and \SI{5.8}{\%} for the two individual UAV-calibration runs. Secondly, by comparing the position of the UAV-calibration signal on the camera focal plane, for a variety of telescope pointing models, we were able to constrain the pointing accuracy of the HESS-I telescopes at the tens of arc-second accuracy level. This is consistent with the pointing accuracy derived from other pointing calibration methods. Importantly both the inter-calibration and pointing accuracy results were achieved with a first-generation UAV-calibration prototype, which eludes to the potential of the technique and highlights that a UAV-based system is a viable calibration technique for current and future ground-based γ-ray telescope arrays.
Citation
Brown, A. M., Muller, J., de Naurois, M., & Clark, P. (2022). Inter-calibration of atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes with UAV-based airborne calibration system. Astroparticle Physics, 140, Article 102695. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.astropartphys.2022.102695
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Feb 7, 2022 |
Online Publication Date | Feb 24, 2022 |
Publication Date | 2022-07 |
Deposit Date | Jun 13, 2022 |
Publicly Available Date | Feb 24, 2023 |
Journal | Astroparticle Physics |
Print ISSN | 0927-6505 |
Publisher | Elsevier |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 140 |
Article Number | 102695 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.astropartphys.2022.102695 |
Related Public URLs | https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05839 |
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Copyright Statement
© 2022. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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