A concept of Lunar Scintillometer (LuSci)

• Main Author: A. Tokovinin
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.588.4042; http://www.ctio.noao.edu/~atokovin/profiler/lusci3.pdf

1 The need for a new instrument Methods of optical turbulence measurement for characterization and monitoring of astronomical sites has come a long way. Yet, an important region between 5 m and 100 m above ground remains poorly characterized. Turbulence in this surface layer (SL) is usually strong and makes a non-negligible contribution to the DIMM seeing measurements made from 5 m above ground. Measurements of turbulence in the SL are needed for the following: 1. Extrapolate DIMM seeing to the height of future telescope, determine optimum dome height. 2. Select a suitable telescope location at a given site. 3. Optimize speci¯c techniques such as ground-layer adaptive optics 4. Characterize and understand sites with a strong SL, especially Antarctic sites. To address these tasks we need to measure few key parameters of the SL turbulence, such as its strength (integral over certain altitude range) and thickness. A low-resolution SL turbulence pro¯le will be su±cient. Usually the SL is probed by micro-thermal sensors on a mast. This method relies on the absolute sensor calibration. Sparse sampling of patchy and non-stationary SL turbulence is a fundamental