PLATO-R is an autonomous, robotic observatory that can be deployed anywhere on the Antarctic plateau by Twin Otter
aircraft. It provides heat, data acquisition, communications, and up to 1kW of electric power to support astronomical and
other experiments throughout the year. PLATO-R was deployed in 2012 January to Ridge A, believed to be the site with
the lowest precipitable water vapour (and hence the best atmospheric transmission at terahertz frequencies) on earth.1-4
PLATO-R improves upon previous PLATO designs that were built into ten-foot shipping containers by being much smaller
and lighter, allowing it to be field-deployable within 2-3 days by a crew of four.
First identied in 2009 as the site with the lowest precipitable water and best terahertz transmission on Earth,
Ridge A is located approximately 150 km south of Dome A, Antarctica. To further rene this optimum location
prior to deployment in 2012 of a robotic THz observatory, we have modelled the atmospheric transmission as
a function of location over a 1,000,000 km square grid using three years of data from the Microwave Humidity
Sounder on the NOAA-18 satellite. The modelling identies a broad area of exceptionally low water vapour close
to the 4,000 metre elevation contour, reaching below 100 microns for extended periods of time.
Nigel is a fiber-fed UV/visible grating spectrograph with a thermoelectrically-cooled 256×1024 pixel CCD camera,
designed to measure the twilight and night sky brightness from 300nm to 850 nm. Nigel has three pairs of fibers,
each with a field-of-view with an angular diameter of 25 degrees, pointing in three fixed positions towards the
sky. The bare fibers are exposed to the sky with no additional optics. The instrument was deployed at Dome A,
Antarctica in January 2009 as part of the PLATO (PLATeau Observatory) robotic observatory. During the 2009
winter, Nigel made approximately six months of continuous observations of the sky, with typically 104 deadtime
between exposures. The resulting spectra provide quantitative information on the sky brightness, the auroral
contribution, and the water vapour content of the atmosphere. We present details of the design, construction
and calibration of the Nigel spectrometer, as well some sample spectra from a preliminary analysis.
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