Schlüsselwörter
(Deutsch)
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Astronomie, Astrophysique, Solar orbiter, ESA, Espace, Space Research & Planetary Science
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Kurzbeschreibung
(Englisch)
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This proposal supports the Swiss-lead STIX instrument onboard ESA’s Solar, and it is a continuation of our previous proposal to cover the year 2022. As the preceding request, it contains a work package on STIX operation including a flight software maintenance contract, as well as a work package on ground software and data archiving. Both these work packages are essential to obtain scientific data and make them available to the science community.
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Projektziele
(Englisch)
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The Spectrometer Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX) is the only Swiss-led instrument onboard ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission. The Solar Orbiter platform hosts 10 delivered instruments to make combined measurements at distances as close as 0.28 AU to investigate how our Sun creates the heliosphere. STIX provides imaging spectroscopy of solar X-ray emissions from 4 to 150 keV and plays a key role in connecting the Solar Orbiter in-situ and remote sensing observations.
Solar Orbiter has been successfully launched and commissioned in the first half of 2020. The spacecraft is working very well, with only minor shortcomings on EMC (Electro-Magnetic Cleanliness) and pointing accuracy. AIRBUS is working on improving these deficiencies, and an update of the spacecraft flight software was performed in 2021. In any case, both these shortcomings are of no concerns for the STIX instrument. The EMC issues have mainly an influence on one sensor of the RPW instrument, and the additional drift in point (~1-2 arcsec) only affects the high-resolution telescopes of the EUI and PHI instrument suites. Anyhow, the STIX aspect system even allows us to correct for such drifts, if we think it is indeed needed.
On the positive side, Solar Orbiter operation team has announced that the available telemetry budget is significantly higher than initially planned. Therefore, additional check-out windows have been implemented during the cruise phase. As STIX resource requirements are rather low compared to other remote-sensing instruments, it has been decided to have STIX observing all the time starting January 1, 2021. This allows STIX to continuously observe the Sun. Thus, we were no longer limited to only download flare data from within the official ‘check-out windows’, but we are able to select from all flares that occurred. This allowed us to allocate our telemetry to the scientifically most interesting flares.
Since the start of 2021, STIX has been observing more or less continuously and has already recorded over 1000 solar flares. A summary of first results is shown in Figure 1 (adapted from Battaglia et al. 2021).
The current proposal is a continuation of the STIX operation funding and covers the year 2022. The work packages proposed here will make it possible to:
• Operate the STIX instrument in space to collect science data in coordination with Solar Orbiter and the other instruments
• Maintain the STIX on-board Flight Software (FSW), including documentation and Instrument telemetry Database (IDB)
• Lead and coordinate the international STIX Ground Software (GSW) team
• Process and archive the STIX data and maintain the data archive
• Maintain, integrate, and improve the STIX Ground Software (GSW) used by the STIX core team and the science community
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