The UVOT instrument houses a series of mirrors, filters, grisms, and detectors that can be used to gather optical and UV data about gamma ray burst afterglows. The modified 30 cm Ritchy-Chretien telescope can slew around to point at an afterglow position within 20 to 70 seconds of receiving the afterglow's coordinates from the Burst Alert Telescope. The UVOT's design and hardware are almost identical to that of the Optical Monitor on the X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM). This has allowed the Swift team to take advantage of several years' worth of OM technical expertise.
UVOT Technical Specifications:
| Telescope aperture | 30 cm |
| Detector | Microchannel Plate Intensified CCD |
| Detector Operation | Photon counting |
| Field of view | 17 by 17 arcmin |
| Detection elements | 2048 by 2048 pixels |
| Plate scale | 0.502 arcsec |
| Telescope PSF | 2.4 arcsecs FWHM at 3500 A |
| Wavelength range | 1700 - 6500 A |
| Colors | U, B, V, UVW1, UVM2, UVW2, White, UV grism, Optical grism |
| Limiting magnitude (B) | B mag = 24 mag in 1000s exposure |