11-06, 08:30– (US/Arizona), Posters
GREAT was a heterodyne receiver that flew on board the SOFIA observatory from early science flights in 2011 until the close of the mission in 2022. GREAT was a PI led instrument that observed at frequencies ranging from 480 to 4700 GHz. In this talk I will discuss the in-flight instrument operation, how observations were undertaken, how the receiver was tuned, how the data quality was monitored and processed in-flight. Unique to the airborne observatory was the system was offline with no internet connection allowed due to IT security reason, I will discuss some of the peculiarities of this setup and how we maintained an up to-date system on the aircraft.
Dr. Ronan Higgins is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cologne. He is currently working as the deputy project engineer for the CCAT observatory. He did his PhD at Maynooth university on the HIFI instrument flown on board the Herschel space observatory. After his PhD he started a postdoctoral position at the University of Cologne where he worked as the support astronomer for the NANTEN2 telescope in norther Chile with particular focus on the SMART heterodyne array receiver. As SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) operations ramped up in 2015 he joined the upGREAT team and worked as an instrument scientist with a focus on the calibration software and housekeeping system. Since 2021 he works on the CCAT observatory which is currently under trial assembly in Germany with shipment to Chile planned for 2024.