HIPO in-flight performance improvements
2014
The High-speed Imaging Photometer for Occultations (HIPO) is a special purpose science instrument for SOFIA. HIPO
can be co-mounted with FLITECAM in the so-called FLIPO configuration for stellar occultation or extrasolar planet
transit observations. We gained some flight experience with HIPO and FLITECAM in 2011 as described in a previous
publication (Dunham, et al., Proc SPIE, 8446-42, 2012). Since that time a number of improvements to HIPO have been
made and a deeper understanding of the airborne environment's impact on photometric precision at optical wavelengths
has been obtained. The improvements to HIPO include an improved beamsplitter for the FLIPO configuration, adding
deep depletion CCDs as a detector option, expanding the filter set to include a Sloan Digital Sky Survey filter set as well
as two custom filters for transit work, and an ability to guide the SOFIA telescope using HIPO data being acquired for
science purposes. We now understand that variations in PSF size due to varying static air density has a noticeable
impact on photometric stability while the related effect of Mach number is unimportant. The seriousness of ozone
absorption in the Chappuis band is now understood and an approach to avoid this has been found. Finally we present
demonstration transit data to illustrate our current transit photometry capability.
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