The Rapid Imaging Planetary Spectrograph

| And now for some preliminary RIPS results at Perkins and AEOS.

| These videos show (left) raw frames, along with (right) "white light" images of Mercury's disk (using a relatively narrow Na pre-filter) and Na spectral images of Mercury's exosphere (i.e., constructed by extracting the processed spectrum frame-by-frame). At Perkins, the motion of RIPS' slit across Mercury is due mostly to various undesired telescope motions (e.g., from wind and jitter). At AEOS, however, the telescope's adaptive optics system helps us to "lock on" Mercury, which enables us to control the motion of the slit across Mercury's disk, leading to a much smoother sampling. Nevertheless, the addition of enough frames in either case allows for a reconstruction of the spatial distribution of Mercury's Na exosphere.