Development of a large blazed transmission grating by effective binary index modulation for the GAIA radial velocity spectrometer

Gaia is an ambitious ESA mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and cinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy. The payload consists of 2 Three Mirror Anastigmat (TMA) telescopes (aperture size â¼1.5 m x 0.5 m), 3 instruments (astrometer, photometer and spectrometer) and 106 butted CCDs assembled to a 0.9 Giga-Pixel focal plane. The Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) of Gaia measures the red shift of the stars in the spectral band between 847 nm and 874 nm. The spectrometer is a fully refractive optics consisting of 2 Fery prisms, 2 prisms, a pass band filter and a blazed transmission grating (instrument mass about 30 kg). It is located in the vicinity of the focal plane and illuminates 12 of the 106 Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs). Gaia is in the implementation phase, the launch of the 2120 kg mass satellite is planned in Dec. 2012.