Image stabilization for Airborne Infrared Spectrometer

The Airborne Infrared Spectrometer (AIR-Spec) took measurements of five infrared coronal emission lines from on board a NSF/NCAR airplane during the solar eclipse in August 2017. An open-loop image stabilization system was implemented using a gyroscope and fast steering mirror; 90% of the 60 millisecond exposures had an RMS jitter below 4.6 arcseconds. To increase the exposure time to 1 second, a closed-loop system is proposed using a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller and an image cross-correlation algorithm. We predict that 100% of 1 second exposures will have an RMS jitter below 4.6 arcseconds. A detailed analysis of the proposed closed-loop stabilization system is presented.