Capabilities and Performance of the High-Energy Energetic-Particles Instrument for the Parker Solar Probe Mission

Creators: Wiedenbeck, M. E.; Burnham, J. A.; Cohen, C. M. S.; Cook, W. R.; Crabill, R. M.; Cummings, A. C.; Davis, A. J.; Hernandez, L.; Kecman, B.; Klemic, J.; Labrador, A. W.; Leske, R. A.; Lopez, S.; Mewaldt, R. A.; Miyasaka, H.; Rankin, J. S.; Riggans, G.; Rusert, M. D.; Stone, E. C.; White, M. L.

Abstract

NASA's Parker Solar Probe (PSP) spacecraft (formerly Solar Probe Plus) is scheduled for launch in July 2018 with a planned heliocentric orbit that will carry it on a series of close passes by the Sun with perihelion distances that eventually will get below 10 solar radii. Among other in-situ and imaging sensors, the PSP payload includes the two-instrument "Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun" suite, which will make coordinated measurements of energetic ions and electrons. The high-energy instrument (EPI-Hi), operating in the MeV energy range, consists of three detector-telescopes using silicon solid-state sensors for measuring composition, energy spectra, angular distributions, and time structure in solar energetic particle events. The expected performance of this instrument has been studied using accelerator calibrations, radioactive-source tests, and simulations. We present the EPI-Hi measurement capabilities drawing on these calibration data and simulation results for illustrations.

Additional Information

Copyright owned by the author(s) under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We thank C. Anderson and D. Miles for administrative support at Caltech, Micron Semiconductor, Ltd. for developing the EPI-Hi detectors, D. Aalami of Space Instruments for developing the bias supply, and the cyclotron laboratories at Michigan State University, Texas A&M University, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for providing calibration beams. Part of the research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, with support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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