Description
SuperSMART is a novel concept to enable medium resolution optical and near-IR spectrophotmetry for a wide range of science cases, with a specific focus on the field of Time Domain Astronomy. It is based around an array of 'small' (0.6-1.0m) commercial telescopes which each feed light independently via one or more fibers to a cryostat containing an array of Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs). This array forms a number of channels of a medium spectral resolution (R=5-10,000) wide passband (350-1800nm) spectrograph, using the KIDSpec concept (O'Brien, JLTP, 2020). The array of telescopes can either be pointed at different targets across the visible sky, or pointed at the same target and the light from each channel can be (incoherently) combined to form an equivalently larger aperture telescope. As MKIDs are read-noise free, photon counting detectors this combining/stacking does not pay the same penalty as it would for similar (semiconductor-based) instruments, such as ESO's X-Shooter. SuperSMART leverages the much improved cost/aperture of prosumer robotic telescopes, compared to standard 4-8m monolithic telescopes.
SuperSMARTs big sister is the Time Domain Telescope, which leverages the full potential of photon-counting spectroscopy. The initial concept for the TDT is 100x 2m class telescopes. This is a planned proposal to ESO's Expanding Horizon's program. In this talk, I will present the concept and the science case for both SuperSMART and the TDT.
