• Development of the Application Software for space instruments/application.
• Design, manufacturing, assembly, test and debugging of digital electronic circuit.
• Development of software/firmware for Programmable devices like CPLD and microcontroller
• Programming of instrumentation for automatization of data acquisition (SCPI)
• Design, development, integration and test of data handling systems for high reliability systems
• Setting up and management of vacuum chambers/systems
• Experience in working in controlled-atmospheric environment (clean rooms)
• Test and characterization of imaging systems
• Assembly, Integration and test of scientific instruments for space applications
• Working xperience with several communications protocols standard and interfaces as RS232, GPIB, Ethernet, Spacewire, SCPI.
• Design, manufacturing, assembly, test and debugging of digital electronic circuit.
• Development of software/firmware for Programmable devices like CPLD and microcontroller
• Programming of instrumentation for automatization of data acquisition (SCPI)
• Design, development, integration and test of data handling systems for high reliability systems
• Setting up and management of vacuum chambers/systems
• Experience in working in controlled-atmospheric environment (clean rooms)
• Test and characterization of imaging systems
• Assembly, Integration and test of scientific instruments for space applications
• Working xperience with several communications protocols standard and interfaces as RS232, GPIB, Ethernet, Spacewire, SCPI.
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This work presents the prototype design and the status of the project.
Next activities are oriented to realize a Digital Pulse Processor readout electronics implemented in such a way that, in the future, it can be built with space-qualified components. The system shall be able to manage flux variations of several orders of magnitude to deal with the extreme Sun conditions: from quiet to the most energetic class-X flares. Beside this, an activity to identify which are the possible signatures of solar events is on-going.
This paper reports the current and the planned activities to implement the sensor’s readout functions in an FPGA-based space-ready electronics.
The stray light calibration was performed in a clean environment in front of the OPSys solar disk divergence simulator (at ALTEC, in Torino, Italy), which is able to emulate different heliocentric distances. Ground calibrations were a unique opportunity to map the Metis stray light level thanks to a pure solar disk simulator without the solar corona. The stray light calibration was limited to the visible light case, being the most stringent. This work is focused on the description of the laboratory facility that was used to perform the stray light calibration and on the calibration results.
Metis features two channels to image the solar corona in two different spectral bands: in the HI Lyman ∝ at 121.6 nm, and in the polarized visible light band (580 – 640 nm). Metis is a solar coronagraph adopting an “inverted occulted” configuration. The inverted external occulter (IEO) is a circular aperture followed by a spherical mirror which back rejects the disk light. The reflected disk light exits the instrument through the IEO aperture itself, while the passing coronal light is collected by the Metis telescope. Common to both channels, the Gregorian on-axis telescope is centrally occulted and both the primary and the secondary mirror have annular shape.
Classic alignment methods adopted for on-axis telescope cannot be used, since the on-axis field is not available. A novel and ad hoc alignment set-up has been developed for the telescope alignment.
An auxiliary visible optical ground support equipment source has been conceived for the telescope alignment. It is made up by four collimated beams inclined and dimensioned to illuminate different sections of the annular primary mirror without being vignetted by other optical or mechanical elements of the instrument.
The entire alignment and verification phase has been performed by the Metis team in collaboration with Thales Alenia Space Torino and took place in ALTEC (Turin) at the Optical Payload System Facility using the Space Optics Calibration Chamber infrastructure, a vacuum chamber especially built and tested for the alignment and calibration of the Metis coronagraph, and suitable for tests of future payloads.
The goal of the alignment, integration, verification and calibration processes is to measure the parameters of the telescope, and the characteristics of the two Metis channels: visible and ultraviolet. They work in parallel thanks to the peculiar optical layout. The focusing and alignment performance of the two channels must be well understood, and the results need to be easily compared to the requirements. For this, a dedicated illumination method, with both channels fed by the same source, has been developed; and a procedure to perform a simultaneous through focus analysis has been adopted.
In this paper the final optical performance achieved by Metis is reported and commented.
During its four-years mission, ARIEL will observe several hundreds of exoplanets ranging from Jupiter- and Neptune-size down to super-Earth and Earth-size with its 1 meter-class telescope.3 The analysis of spectra and photometric data will allow to extract the chemical fingerprints of gases and condensates in the planets atmospheres, including the elemental composition for the most favorable targets. It will also enable the study of thermal and scattering properties of the atmosphere as the planet orbits around its parent star.
This paper provides a description of the overall manufactured system and its performance and shows the additional resources available at the XUVLab laboratory in Florence that make SCOUT exploitable by whatever compact (within 1 m) optical experiment that investigates the UV band of the spectrum.
The solar corona will be observed thanks to the presence on the first satellite, facing the Sun, of an external occulter producing an artificial eclipse of the Sun disk. The second satellite will carry on the coronagraph telescope and the digital camera system in order to perform imaging of the inner part of the corona in visible polarized light, from 1.08 R⦿ up to about 3 R⦿.
One of the main metrological subsystems used to control and to maintain the relative (i.e. between the two satellites) and absolute (i.e. with respect to the Sun) FF attitude is the Shadow Position Sensor (SPS) assembly. It is composed of eight micro arrays of silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) able to measure with the required sensitivity and dynamic range the penumbral light intensity on the Coronagraph entrance pupil.
In the following of the present paper we describe the overall SPS subsystem and its readout electronics with respect to the capability to satisfy the mission requirements, from the light conversion process on board the silicon-based SPS devices up to the digital signal readout and sampling.
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