Performances of the Planck-HFI cryogenic thermal control system
Résumé
The core of the High Frequency Instrument (HFI) on-board the Planck satellite consists of 52 bolometric detectors cooled at 0.1 Kelvin. In order to achieve such a low temperature, the HFI cryogenic architecture consists in several stages cooled using different active coolers. These generate weak thermal fluctuations on the HFI thermal stages. Without a dedicated thermal control system these fluctuations could produce unwanted systematic effects, altering the scientific data. The HFI thermal architecture allows to minimise these systematic effects, thanks to passive and active control systems described in this paper. The passive and active systems are used to damp the high and low frequency fluctuations respectively. The last results regarding the tests of the HFI passive and active thermal control systems are presented here. The thermal transfer functions measurement between active coolers and HFI cryogenic stages will be presented first. Then the stability of the temperatures obtained on the various cryogenic stages with PID regulations systems will be checked through analysis of their power spectrum density.