Speaker
Description
ESA’s Space Safety & Security activities are aimed at monitoring and mitigating the impact of space hazards to critical infrastructure. One of the cornerstones of these activities is development of a Space Weather monitoring system. A significant undertaking towards this is a mission to the L5 Sun-Earth Lagrange point. A complement of remote-sensing instruments and a suite of in-situ instruments is planned, with Phase A/B1 studies completed this year. The in-situ suite studied consisted of 5 instruments, a Magnetometer, a Solar Wind Monitor, a Medium Energy Particle Spectrometer, a Radiation Monitor and an X-ray Flux Monitor. This paper will discuss the Plasma Analyser (PLA), the suite’s solar wind monitor.
PLA is a top-hat type electrostatic analyser with enhanced performance features that include field-of-view steering and a variable geometric factor system. PLA draws on significant heritage from the SWA instrument suite currently on-board the Solar Orbiter mission, particularly the EAS sensor which uses similar performance enhancements over conventional top-hat analysers. The instrument is designed to measure ions at energies between 50 eV to 33 keV (~100 km/s to 2500 km/s) covering an FOV of 45° x 45° and an instrument sensitivity covering the range 0.1 to 150 particles/cm3.
Details of the instrument design will be presented and key challenges in meeting the measurement requirements and mission goals will be discussed. Currently, several technology developments activities are being pursued including optimisation of the optics and other sub-systems. Details of these will also be presented.
