LEMUR: Large European Module for solar Ultraviolet Research. European contribution to JAXA's Solar-C mission

Understanding the solar outer atmosphere requires concerted, simultaneous solar observations from the visible to the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) and soft X-rays, at high spatial resolution (between 0.1" and 0.3"), at high temporal resolution (on the order of 10 s, i.e., the time scale of chromospheric dynamics), with a wide temperature coverage (0.01 MK to 20 MK, from the chromosphere to the flaring corona), and the capability of measuring magnetic fields through spectropolarimetry at visible and near-infrared wavelengths. Simultaneous spectroscopic measurements sampling the entire temperature range are particularly important. These requirements are fulfilled by the Japanese Solar-C mission (Plan B), composed of a spacecraft in a geosynchronous orbit with a payload providing a significant improvement of imaging and spectropolarimetric capabilities in the UV, visible, and near-infrared with respect to what is available today and foreseen in the near future. The Large European Module for solar Ultraviolet Research (LEMUR), described in this paper, is a large VUV telescope feeding a scientific payload of high-resolution imaging spectrographs and cameras. LEMUR consists of two major components: a VUV solar telescope with a 30 cm diameter mirror and a focal length of 3.6 m, and a focal-plane package composed of VUV spectrometers covering six carefully chosen wavelength ranges between 17 and 127 nm. The LEMUR slit covers 280" on the Sun with 0.14" per pixel sampling. In addition, LEMUR is capable of measuring mass flows velocities (line shifts) down to 2 km/s or better. LEMUR has been proposed to ESA as the European contribution to the Solar C mission.Comment: 35 pages, 14 figures. To appear on Experimental Astronom

Stray light testing of WISPR baffle development model

Solar Probe Plus (SPP) is a NASA mission developed to visit and study the sun closer than ever before. SPP is designed to orbit as close as 7 million km (9.86 solar radii) from Sun center. One of its instruments: WISPR (Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe Plus) will be the first ‘local’ imager to provide the relation between the large-scale corona and the in-situ measurements.The Centre Spatial de Liège in Belgium (CSL) owns a stray light test facility for In Field and Out of Field of View stray light measurements. This facility is updated to realize a stray light test on the WISPR Development Model (DM).WISP

STEREO: Heliospheric Imager design, pre-flight, and in-flight response comparison

The Heliospheric Imager (HI) is part of the SECCHI suite of instruments on-board the two STEREO observatories launched in October 2006. The two HI instruments provide stereographic image pairs of solar coronal plasma and coronal mass ejections (CME) over a field of view ranging from 13 to 330 R[SUB]0[/SUB]. The HI instrument is a combination of two refractive optical systems with a two stage multi-vane baffle system. The key challenge of the instrument design is the rejection of the solar disk light by the front baffle, with total straylight attenuation at the detector level of the order of 10[SUP]-13[/SUP] to 10[SUP]-15[/SUP]. Optical systems and baffles were designed and tested to reach the required rejection. This paper presents the pre-flight optical tests performed under vacuum on the two HI flight models in flight temperature conditions. These tests included an end-to-end straylight verification of the front baffle efficiency, a co-alignment and an optical calibration of the optical systems. A comparison of the theoretical predictions of the instrument response and performance with the calibration results is presented. The instrument in-flight photometric and stray light performance are also presented and compared with the expected results

SECCHI observations of the Sun-s Garden-Hose Density spiral

The SECCHI HI2 white-light imagers on the STEREO A and B spacecraft show systematically different proper motions of material moving outward from the Sun in front of high-speed solar wind streams from coronal holes. As a group of ejections enters the eastern (A) field of view, the elements at the rear of the group appear to overrun the elements at the front. (This is a projection effect and does not mean that the different elements actually merge.) The opposite is true in the western (B) field; the elements at the front of the group appear to run away from the elements at the rear. Elongation/time maps show this effect as a characteristic grouping of the tracks of motion into convergent patterns in the east and divergent patterns in the west, consistent with ejections from a single longitude on the rotating Sun. Evidently, we are observing segments of the “garden-hose” spiral made visible when fast wind from a low-latitude coronal hole compresses blobs of streamer material being shed at the leading edge of the hole