Optical design of Arago’s spectropolarimeter

The space mission Arago is proposed as a candidate to ESA’s Cosmic Vision M5 call by the UVMag consortium. Arago is dedicated to the study of the dynamic 3D environment of stars and planets. Thanks to a high-resolution UV and visible spectropolarimeter, the instrument will detect and characterize the magnetic fields of the stars, their environment and its impact on exoplanets. Scientific requirements impose a wide spectral range from 119 to 888 nm with a single full-Stokes polarimeter followed by two high-resolution spectrographs. To achieve these stringent specifications, a polychromatic concept of polarimeter has been studied and tested thanks to a R and T study funded by CNES. Using an optimized combination of Magnesium Fluoride plates followed by a polarization analyzer, it measures all four Stokes parameters with a constant efficiency over the spectral range. This is performed with a sequence of 6 sub-exposures acquired with different plate angles. The two orthogonal polarized beams coming out of the polarimeter feed two spectrographs. The UV spectrograph has a spectral resolution of at least 25000 over its spectral range, while the visible spectrograph works at least at 35000. Finally, to image the high-resolution spectra, a CCD detector and a MCP were chosen for the visible and UV arms of the instrument respectively. This paper describes the complete optical design of Arago’s instrument, as proposed to ESA as an answer to its M5 call, from the 1.3-m diameter telescope to the detectors. The design of the polarimeter is presented as well as the unusual way of demodulating the polarization information, in order to have a polychromatic polarimeter working with the same efficiency from FUV to NIR. The optical design of the UV and visible échelle spectrographs and their detection chains are also presented, as well as the achieved performances.