Investigating the in-flight performance of the UVIT payload on AstroSat

Abstract

We have studied the performance of the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope payload on AstroSat and derived a calibration of the far-ultraviolet (FUV) and near-ultraviolet (NUV) instruments on board. We find that the sensitivity of both the FUV and NUV channels is as expected from ground calibrations, with the FUV effective area about 35 per cent and the NUV effective area about the same as that of GALEX . The point spread function of the instrument is on the order of 1.2–1.6. We have found that pixel-to-pixel variations in the sensitivity are less than 10 per cent with spacecraft motion compensating for most of the flat-field variations. We derived a distortion correction but recommend that it be applied post-processing as part of an astrometric solution.