Friday, October 31, 2025 at 12:15 pm

JILA Foothills room

Aafaque Khan, University of Arizona

"Aspera SmallSat: A spirited Ultraviolet mission to map the ghostly gas around galaxies"

Abstract:

Aspera, a NASA Astrophysics Pioneers mission, will study diffuse O VI (103.2 nm) emission from the warm-hot gas in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of nearby galaxies. Mapping this elusive gas is key to understanding how galaxies evolve and recycle material into their surroundings. The warm-hot CGM holds a large fraction of a galaxy’s baryons but has been difficult to study beyond narrow absorption-line observations. Using O VI as a tracer, Aspera will create the first emission maps of this faint component, revealing its structure and distribution. The Aspera payload includes two identical Rowland Circle-type long-slit spectrographs that share a single microchannel plate detector, each with an off-axis parabola mirror and toroidal diffraction grating optimized for the ~101–105 nm bandpass. This talk will share highlights from our ten-month effort of optical alignment and integration of the flight spectrographs at the University of Arizona, and the exciting steps ahead as the payload moves into environmental testing on the path to a 2026 launch.

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