Speaker
Dr
Sylvie Benck
(Center for Space Radiations, Université catholique de Louvain)
Description
Science-class space radiation spectrometers / monitors are useful tools embarked on spacecraft to collect data for various applications including spacecraft anomaly diagnosis, space weather services and validation / improvement / development of radiation environment models.
The operational principle of the Energetic Particle Telescope (EPT), predominantly a range telescope, has led to a{flushright}n instrument with excellent in-flight particle discrimination capability and immunity to contamination by off-field-of-view particles.
The objective of the mEPT development is to produce a compact radiation monitor / spectrometer that can be packaged as a hybrid chip of size <200 cm$^{3}$, but whose performance is comparable to that of the EPT. This implies reliable particle discrimination capability within their respective energy range (electrons: 0.1–7 MeV, protons: 3–400 MeV, heavier ions: >10 MeV) and the possibility to reconstruct the incident particle spectra with no condition on the predefined spectral shape. The instrument is designed to cope with fluxes of up to $10^{8}$#/cm$^{2}$/s, thus capable of energetic charged particle sensing in GEO, GTO, MEO orbits and during Electric Propulsion orbit raising. The required telemetry data with the host satellite is reduced to minimum (<2.5 kbit per integration time for particle spectra of at least eight energy bins, dose information, housekeeping data…) and the targeted power consumption of the device should be <1 W. The necessary performance is achieved by use of integrated circuit (IC) technology repurposed from the ESA JUICE mission. A successor IC is proposed to power future mEPT devices.
The resulting data products and instrument compactness make the mEPT stand out as a suitable instrument that can be placed within a constellation for multi-point particle flux measurements as foreseen within ESA’s D3S.
More details of this instrument and its possible applications will be presented.
Primary author
Dr
Sylvie Benck
(Center for Space Radiations, Université catholique de Louvain)
Co-authors
Dr
Dirk Meier
(Integrated Detector Electronics AS)
Dr
Mathias Cyamukungu
(Center for Space Radiations, Université catholique de Louvain)
Dr
Stanislav Borisov
(Center for Space Radiations, Université catholique de Louvain)
Mr
Timo Stein
(Integrated Detector Electronics AS)
