THE COSMIC INFRARED BACKGROUND EXPERIMENT ( CIBER ): A SOUNDING ROCKET PAYLOAD TO STUDY THE NEAR INFRARED EXTRAGALACTIC BACKGROUND LIGHT

Abstract

The Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) is a suite of four instruments designed to study the near infrared (IR) background light from above the Earth's atmosphere. The instrument package comprises two imaging telescopes designed to characterize spatial anisotropy in the extragalactic IR background caused by cosmological structure during the epoch of reionization, a low resolution spectrometer to measure the absolute spectrum of the extragalactic IR background, and a narrow band spectrometer optimized to measure the absolute brightness of the zodiacal light foreground. In this paper we describe the design and characterization of the CIBER payload. The detailed mechanical, cryogenic, and electrical design of the system are presented, including all system components common to the four instruments. We present the methods and equipment used to characterize the instruments before and after flight, and give a detailed description of CIBER's flight profile and configurations. CIBER is designed to be recoverable and has flown four times, with modifications to the payload having been informed by analysis of the first flight data. All four instruments performed to specifications during the subsequent flights, and the scientific data from these flights are currently being analyzed.

New Spectral Evidence of an Unaccounted Component of the Near-infrared Extragalactic Background Light from the CIBER

“…Thermal emission from the rocket skin During flights we observe scattered thermal emission from the rocket skin corresponding to a temperature of T ∼400 K (Zemcov et al 2013). This thermal emission was clearly observed in the first flight, and its origin was identified in laboratory tests (Tsumura et al 2013a).…”

“…The radiance from the sphere was absolutely calibrated using an absolutely calibrated spectrograph provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Zemcov et al 2013;Tsumura et al 2013a;Arai et al 2015). The spectral calibration was performed using a tunable laser and a monochrometer with an accuracy of ∼1 nm for all four flights (Arai et al 2015).…”

“…The FOV of the LRS is determined from the slit width and the point spread function measured in the laboratory using monochromatic light sources (Zemcov et al 2013;Tsumura et al 2013a;Arai et al 2015). To simulate the completeness magnitude and calculate the continuous spectrum of ISL, we carried out additional simulations by the same method, but using a model of star counts based on stellar population synthesis, TRILEGAL (Girardi et al 2005).…”

“…Background Experiment (CIBER) (Zemcov et al 2013;Bock et al 2013;Tsumura et al 2013a; Korngut et al 2013). …”

The Diffuse Near-Infrared Background Spectrum From Akari

“…If these processes take place, the TeV γ-ray and the EBL excess can coexist. The origins of the excess emission and fluctuation are still not clear, and new observations are widely expected to delineate their origins The Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment (CIBER) (Zemcov et al, 2013) will provide the spectrum of the sky at 0.75-1.8 µm with the Low Resolution Spectrometer (LRS) (Tsumura et al, 2010(Tsumura et al, , 2013d. Observation from outside the zodiacal cloud is also highly desirable to conduct an ideal observation of the EBL without the strong ZL foreground.…”