End-to-end tests of the TuMag instrument for the SUNRISE III mission

Ground-based and airborne instrumentation for astronomy IX (2022), Montreal, jul 17-22, 2022.--Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering vol. 12184 Article number 121842FSUNRISE III mission is a one-meter aperture telescope onboard a balloon within NASA Long Duration Balloon Program. Three post-focus instruments are used for studying the Sun's dynamics and magnetism, among which the Tunable Magnetograph (TuMag) is a tunable imaging spectropolarimeter. TuMag is a diffraction-limited imager, a high sensitivity polarimeter (< 10(-3)), and a high-resolution spectrometer (Delta lambda similar to 65 m angstrom). It will be able to study solar magnetic fields at high spatial resolution (similar to 100 km on the solar surface). It will make images of the solar surface magnetic field after measuring the state of polarization of light within three selected spectral lines: the Fe I lines at 525.02 nm and 525.06 nm, and the Mg I b2 line at 517.27 nm. It will be sensitive to the solar vector magnetic fields and line-of-sight velocities, in the photospheric and chromospheric layers. TuMag will be the first solar magnetograph onboard an aerospace platform with the capability of tuning the solar line to be observed. In this paper the TuMag end-to-end tests carried out during the verification phase are described. These tests are performed to characterize and calibrate the instrument. Specifically, they determine the polarimetric and spectroscopic performances of the instrument as well as the image quality. The availability of a singular facility, an ISO6 clean room with a coelostat on the building roof, allowed the use of solar light during the verification campaign. This was key to a complete instrument verification due to the unique spectroscopic and polarimetric characteristics of solar light.The authors would like to thank Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion from the Spanish government for the support of this research via the grant Space Solar Physics RTI2018-096886-B-C5 and "Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa" grant SEV-2017-0709.Peer reviewe

Tratamiento extrahospitalario del infarto agudo de miocardio en Andalucía

Introducción y objetivos. En ensayos clínicos y metaanálisis se ha demostrado que la trombólisis extrahospitalaria es eficaz. Nuestro objetivo es analizar el manejo del infarto agudo de miocardio por equipos de emergencias extrahospitalarios, así como evaluar los factores asociados a la aplicación de fibrinólisis extrahospitalaria. Pacientes y método. Registro prehospitalario continuo de pacientes atendidos y diagnosticados de síndrome coronario agudo con elevación del segmento ST por los equipos de emergencias extrahospitalarios de Andalucía. Duración: 2 años (2001-2002). Se realiza un seguimiento al ingreso hospitalario y al mes de éste. Resultados. Se atendió a un total de 981 pacientes, con una edad media de 65 ± 13 años, de los que 777 (79,2%) eran varones. Se realizaron 152 (15,5%) fibrinólisis extrahospitalarias. El 18% de éstas se realizó en la primera hora de evolución y el 68% en las primeras 2 h, sin que se produjeran accidentes cerebrovasculares hemorrágicos posfibrinólisis. La mortalidad en el ingreso hospitalario fue de 206 pacientes (21%), de los cuales 8 (0,8%) fueron tratados con fibrinólisis extrahospitalaria. Las variables asociadas a la administración de fibrinólisis extrahospitalaria fueron la edad < 55 años (p < 0,0001), la presión arterial sistólica normal (odds ratio = 6,825; intervalo de confianza del 95%, 2,442-19,069) y el diagnóstico hospitalario de infarto agudo de miocardio anterior (p < 0,022). Conclusiones. La fibrinólisis extrahospitalaria realizada por los equipos de emergencias permite aplicar el tratamiento dentro de los intervalos óptimos de tiempo. La mortalidad en el ingreso hospitalario en este subgrupo de pacientes es menor que en los no tratados con fibrinólisis extrahospitalaria. Además, la baja tasa de complicaciones muestra la seguridad del procedimiento. No obstante, los pacientes tratados con fibrinólisis extrahospitalaria parecen ser los de menor riesgo

A Generalized Phase Diversity Technique Using Multiple Defocused Images

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Phase diversity techniques commonly employ a pair of focused–defocused images to retrieve the incident wave front and to restore the observed scene. However, the combination of more images, each one affected by a different amount of defocus, has been barely explored in solar astronomy. In this work we reformulate the "classic" two-images phase diversity approach to accommodate an arbitrary number of phase differences and we investigate its performance in synthetic magnetohydrodynamical simulations of the solar scene corrupted by noise and degraded by a certain set of aberrations. We employ different combinations of images defocused from ±0.5 λ up to ±2 λ (peak to peak) and compare both the retrieved wave front with the incident one and the restored images with the unaberrated noiseless scene. We investigate the effect of using a series of images defocused both symmetrically and asymmetrically with respect to the focused one. In these two cases the performance of the method is improved with the use of more than two images, although it benefits more from the use of symmetric defocuses. We find also that there is a qualitative best choice of the number of phase diversity images in terms of the goodness of the wave front retrieval and of the restored object. The presented method has a potential use either in instruments equipped with a refocusing mechanism or during the laboratory calibrations of the instrument provided that an optical target can be defocused manually by different amounts. © 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through projects ESP-2016-77548-C5-1-R, and by the Spanish Science Ministry "Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa" Program under grant SEV-2017-0709 and project RTI2018-096886-B-C51. D.O.S. also acknowledges financial support from a Ramón y Cajal fellowship.Peer reviewe

Performance of Sequential Phase Diversity with Dynamical Solar Scenes

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Phase diversity techniques are usually based on the comparison of synchronously acquired pairs of focused–defocused images. This way, differences between both images are avoided except from random pixel variations due to noise on the detector and the phase diversity itself. In some astronomical instruments, though, the two images are not taken simultaneously. This work studies the impact of carrying out phase diversity with pairs of asynchronously acquired images while observing an evolving solar scene. We evaluate the performance of this technique as a function of the time gap between the images through the use of a magnetohydrodynamical simulation of the solar scene as observed by an instrument. We describe the incident wave front with two numbers of Zernike polynomials (20 or 32) to explore their effect on the wave front sensing accuracy and we employ two levels of noise to study their impact in the object restoration. We find that a time gap among our simulation images smaller than ∼10 s has a negligible impact on the performance of the method. The rms error of the Zernike coefficients fitting worsens exponentially from there on, but the evolution is similar no matter the number of polynomials used in the fitting. Meanwhile, the quality of the object restoration benefits from lower noise levels, but it decreases linearly with the time gap independently of the amount of noise. © 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.This work has been supported by the Spanish MCIN/AEI through projects ESP-2016-77548-C5-1-R and RTI2018-096886-B-C51, as well as by the Spanish Science Ministry "Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa" Program under grant SEV-2017-0709, and by the European Union ERDF, a way of making Europe. D.O.S. also acknowledges financial support through the Ramón y Cajal fellowship.Peer reviewe

Optimal Defocus for Phase Diversity Wave Front Retrieval

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Phase diversity techniques are widely employed in solar astronomy to evaluate and correct the aberrations stemming from atmospheric turbulences, the telescope, and its instruments. The method uses information provided by a pair of images. One of them is usually focused while the other one is defocused. The amount of defocus to be induced is somehow arbitrary, though. In this work we carry out a series of numerical experiments with artificial solar images to investigate the performance of phase diversity for different choices of the relative defocus among the two images. The experiments allow us to determine the amount of defocus that produces the best wave front restoration when changing: (1) the number of Zernike polynomials of the retrieved and/or incident wave fronts; (2) the signal-to-noise ratio of the images; (3) the amplitude of the incident aberrations; and (4) the observed scene. We find a correlation between the amount of defocus needed for optimal restorations and the number of Zernike polynomials employed in the optimization. Values larger than the typically accepted choice of 1λ (peak to peak) are obtained in most cases. © 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.This work has been supported by the Spanish MCIN/AEI through projects ESP-2016-77548-C5-1-R and RTI2018-096886-B-C51, as well as by Spanish Science Ministry "Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa" Program under grant SEV-2017-0709, and by the European Union ERDF, a way of making Europe. D.O.S. also acknowledges financial support through the Ramón y Cajal fellowship.Peer reviewe

CASPER: A mission to study the time-dependent evolution of the magnetic solar chromosphere and transition regions

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Com mons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licen ses/by/4.0/Our knowledge about the solar chromosphere and transition region (TR) has increased in the last decade thanks to the huge scientific return of space-borne observatories like SDO, IRIS, and Hinode, and suborbital rocket experiments like CLASP1, CLASP2, and Hi-C. However, the magnetic nature of those solar regions remain barely explored. The chromosphere and TR of the Sun harbor weak fields and are in a low ionization stage both having critical effects on their thermodynamic behavior. Relatively cold gas structures, such as spicules and prominences, are located in these two regions and display a dynamic evolution in high-resolution observations that static and instantaneous 3D-magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models are not able to reproduce. The role of the chromosphere and TR as the necessary path to a (largely unexplained) very hot corona calls for the generation of observationally based, time-dependent models of these two layers that include essential, up to now disregarded, ingredients in the modeling such as the vector magnetic field. We believe that the community is convinced that the origin of both the heat and kinetic energy observed in the upper layers of the solar atmosphere is of magnetic origin, but reliable magnetic field measurements are missing. The access to sensitive polarimetric measurements in the ultraviolet wavelengths has been elusive until recently due to limitations in the available technology. We propose a low-risk and high-Technology Readiness Level (TRL) mission to explore the magnetism and dynamics of the solar chromosphere and TR. The mission baseline is a low-Earth, Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude between 600 and 800 km. The proposed scientific payload consists of a 30 cm aperture telescope with a spectropolarimeter covering the hydrogen Ly-alpha and the Mg II h&k ultraviolet lines. The instrument shall record high-cadence, full spectropolarimetric observations of the solar upper atmosphere. Besides the answers to a fundamental solar problem the mission has a broader scientific return. For example, the time-dependent modeling of the chromospheres of stars harboring exoplanets is fundamental for estimating the planetary radiation environment. The mission is based on technologies that are mature enough for space and will provide scientific measurements that are not available by other means. © 2022, The Author(s).This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through project ESP-2016-77548-C5-1-R and by the FEDER/AEI/MCIU RTI2018-096886-C51 project. D.O.S. also acknowledges financial support through the Ramón y Cajal fellowship and financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the “Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa” award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709). JTB acknowledges the funding received from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Advance Grant agreement No. 742265).Peer reviewe

Multivariable time-dependent analysis of the impact of azacitidine in patients with lower-risk myelodysplastic syndrome and unfavorable specific lower-risk score

Scoring systems for lower-risk myelodysplastic syndrome (LR-MDS) recognize patients with a poorer than expected outcome. This study retrospectively analyzes the role of azacitidine in LR-MDS with adverse risk score and compared to an historical cohort treated with best supportive care or erythropoiesis-stimulating agents. Overall response to AZA was 40%. One and 2-year probabilities of survival were 62% and 45% for AZA vs. 25% and 11% (P=10(-4)). In a multivariable time-dependent analysis, response to AZA (CR/PR/HI) was associated with an improved survival (HR=0.234, 95% CI, 0.063-0.0863; P=0.029). Thrombocytopenia (<50 × 10(9)L(-1)) is confirmed as an adverse parameter in LR-MDS (HR=1.649, 95% CI, 1.012-2.687; P=0.045)

SPGCam: A specifically tailored camera for solar observations

Designing a new astronomical instrument typically challenges the available cameras on the market. In many cases, no camera can fulfill the requirements of the instrument in terms of photon budget, speed, and even interfaces with the rest of the instrument. In this situation, the only options are to either downgrade the performance of the instrument or design new cameras from scratch, provided it is possible to identify a compliant detector. The latter is the case of the SPGCams, the cameras developed to be used with the Tunable Magnetograph (TuMag) and the Sunrise Chromospheric Infrared spectroPolarimeter (SCIP) for the Sunrise iii mission. SPGCams have been designed, developed, and built entirely in-house by the Solar Physics Group (SPG) at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC). We report here on the scientific rationale and system engineering requirements set by the two instruments that drove the development, as well as on the technical details and trade-offs used to fulfill the specifications. The cameras were fully verified before the flight, and results from the assembly and verification campaign are presented as well. SPGCams share the design, although some parametric features differentiate the visible cameras (for TuMag) and the IR ones (for SCIP). Even though they were specifically developed for the Sunrise iii mission, the robust and careful design makes them suitable for different applications in other astronomical instruments