Optical telescope BIRT in ORIGIN for gamma ray burst observing

The ORIGIN concept is a space mission with a gamma ray, an X-ray and an optical telescope to observe the gamma ray bursts at large Z to determine the composition and density of the intergalactic matter in the line of sight. It was an answer to the ESA M3 call for proposal. The optical telescope is a 0.7-m F/1 with a very small instrument box containing 3 instruments: a slitless spectrograph with a resolution of 20, a multi-imager giving images of a field in 4 bands simultaneously, and a cross-dispersed Échelle spectrograph giving a resolution of 1000. The wavelength range is 0.5 μm to 1.7 μm. All instruments fit together in a box of 80 mm x 80 mm x 200 mm. The low resolution spectrograph uses a very compact design including a special triplet. It contains only spherical surfaces except for one tilted cylindrical surface to disperse the light. To reduce the need for a high precision pointing, an Advanced Image Slicer was added in front of the high resolution spectrograph. This spectrograph uses a simple design with only one mirror for the collimator and another for the camera. The Imager contains dichroics to separate the bandwidths and glass thicknesses to compensate the differences in path length. All 3 instruments use the same 2k x 2k detector simultaneously so that telescope pointing and tip-tilt control of a fold mirror permit to place the gamma ray burst on the desired instrument without any other mechanism. © 2012 SPIE.