SWAS Spacecraft
The Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite
(SWAS)
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    The SWAS Instrument



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    SWAS is a complete radio telescope in space

    SWAS has a 55 x 71 cm elliptical off-axis Cassegrain telescope with a beam width of 4 arcminutes at its operating frequencies.

    The submillimeter radiometers are a pair of passively cooled subharmonic Schottky diode receivers, with receiver noise figures of 2500-3000 K.

    The outputs of the two SWAS receivers are combined to form a final intermediate frequency, which extends from 1.4 to 2.8 GHz. An acousto-optical spectrometer (AOS) (provided by the University of Cologne) records these spectra (taken every 2 seconds by the spacecraft) which are dispersed into 1400 1 MHz channels by the spectrometer.

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