A balloon-borne Acousto-Optic Tunable Filter imaging camera for planetary science investigations

A balloon-borne Acousto-Optic Tunable Filter (AOTF) hyperspectral imager is ideally suited to address numerous outstanding questions in planetary science. The spectral agility, narrowband wavelength selection, tolerance to the near-space environment, and spectral coverage afforded by AOTFs would enable investigations not feasible from ground-based facilities. A notional AOTF imager design includes both visible and near-infrared channels to take full advantage of the spectral coverage of an AOTF.We explore an example use case of synoptic observations of clouds on the giant planets using the visible channel of such an instrument. Although technical challenges such as detector cooling would require further performance modeling, an AOTF hyperspectral imager is a logical choice for giant planet imaging investigations from a balloon platform. The ability to rapidly acquire hyperspectral image cubes, thereby obtaining spectra of all locations on the planet that could elucidate atmospheric structure and dynamical processes, offers a unique advantage over traditional imaging techniques.