Spectroscopic Investigation of Nebular Gas (SING): instrument design, assembly and calibration

Abstract

The Spectroscopic Investigation of Nebular Gas (SING) is a near-ultraviolet (NUV) low-resolution spectrograph payload designed to operate in the NUV range, 1400 Å – 2700 Å, from a stable space platform. SING telescope has a primary aperture of 298 mm, feeding the light to the long-slit UV spectrograph. SING has a field of view (FOV) of 1◦, achieving a spatial resolution of 1.33 arcminute and spectral resolution of 3.7 Å(R ∼ 600) at the central wavelength. SING employs a micro-channel plate (MCP) with a CMOS readout-based photon-counting detector. The instrument is designed to observe diffuse sources such as nebulae, supernova remnants, and the interstellar medium (ISM) to understand their chemistry. SING was selected by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs to be hosted on the Chinese Space Station. The instrument will undergo qualification tests as per the launch requirements. In this paper, we describe the hardware design, optomechanical assembly, and calibration of the instrument.