Ultraviolet Spectroscopy for the Next Decade Enabled Through Nanofabrication Techniques

The recently released Astro2020 Decadal Survey identified an IR/O/UV large strategic mission as the number one priority in the next decade. A main science focus for UV spectroscopy is understanding stellar impacts on their environments. UV radiation from low mass stars can greatly influence planetary habitability by altering chemistry of atmospheres while magnetic activity can drive atmospheric loss. Furthermore, understanding winds from massive stars through their UV spectra will constrain models of stellar mass loss and their dependence on stellar characteristics such as mass and metallicity. UV spectra of stars can also help us understand binary evolution, galactic spectra, photoionization rates, and impacts on protostellar disks. Astro2020 also prioritized an ambitious course of technology maturation specifically for supporting the IR/O/UV strategic mission. This proposal aims to develop UV diffracting optics, a key technology for future UV spectrographs. These efforts leverage heavily from a previous SAT program, which developed viable fabrication techniques for improving echelle gratings and creating custom groove shapes on curved surfaces. The continuation of these studies will increase the performance of UV gratings to reach requirements for future missions. In addition to using performance testing to verify the fabricated optics, they will be incorporated into existing suborbital rocket programs for technology readiness maturation in the real-world conditions of a flight instrument. High-efficiency, UV echelles and custom-groove, curved-substrate gratings are enabled through a combination of electron-beam lithography (e-beam) and subsequent etching processes. This SAT program will utilize the world-class Nanofabrication Lab within the Materials Research Institute at Penn State University. The e-beam tool writes each groove individually and can be programmed to create custom groove directions with sub-nanometer resolution. Once the precision patterns are written, dry and wet etch processes can transfer the pattern into the substrate. These fabrication methods have been used successfully in the previous SAT study to create medium-fidelity echelles and curved-substrate prototypes. The new SAT program will extend these efforts to create high-fidelity echelles and full-sized, curved-substrate, flight-like gratings.

The Strategic Astrophysics Technology program (SAT) supports focused development efforts for key technologies to the point at which they are ready to feed into major missions in the three science themes of the Astrophysics Division: Exoplanet Exploration, Cosmic Origins, and the Physics of the Cosmos. This program is specifically designed to address middle technology readiness level (TRL) "gaps" between levels 3 and 6: the maturation of technologies that have been established as feasible, but which are not yet sufficiently mature to incorporate into flight missions without introducing an unacceptable level of risk. NASA does not require a data management plan for proposals to SAT.

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