The Wide-Field Imaging Interferometry Testbed I: purpose, testbed design, data, and synthesis algorithms

The Wide-field Imaging Interferometry Testbed (WIIT) was designed to validate, experiment with, and refine the technique of wide field mosaic imaging for optical/IR interferometers. Here we offer motivation for WIIT, present the testbed design, and describe algorithms that can be used to reduce the data from a spatial and spectral Michelson interferometer. A conventional single-detector Michelson interferometer operating with narrow bandwidth at center wavelength is limited in its field of view to the primary beam of the individual telescope apertures, or similar to lambda(c)/d(tel) radians, where d(tel) is the telescope diameter. Such a field is too small for many applications; often one wishes to image extended sources. We are developing and testing techniques analogous to the mosaicing method employed in millimeter and radio astronomy, but applicable to optical/IR Michelson interferometers, in which beam combination is done in the pupil plane. An N-pix X N-pix array detector placed in the image plane of the interferometer is used to record simultaneously the fringe patterns from many contiguous telescope fields, effectively multiplying the field size by N-pix/2, where the factor 2 allows for Nyquist sampling. This technique will be especially valuable for interferometric space observatories, such as the Space Infrared Interferometric Telescope (SPIRIT) and the Submillimeter Probe of the Evolution of Cosmic Structure (SPECS). SPIRIT and SPECS will be designed to provide sensitive, high angular resolution, far-IR/subrmillimeter observations of fields several arcminutes in diameter, and views of the universe complementary to those provided by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Next-Generation Space Telescope (NGST), and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA).