학술논문

The Energetic Particle Telescope (EPT) on Board PROBA-V: Description of a New Science-Class Instrument for Particle Detection in Space
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on. 61(6):3667-3681 Dec, 2014
Subject
Nuclear Engineering
Bioengineering
Spectroscopy
Ionizing radiation
Radiation detectors
Monitoring
Aerospace electronics
Telescopes
Particle measurements
Energetic particle detector
instrumentation
particle spectrometer
space radiation environment
Language
ISSN
0018-9499
1558-1578
Abstract
This paper provides a detailed description of the Energetic Particle Telescope (EPT) accommodated on board the PROBA-V satellite launched on May 7th, 2013 on a LEO, 820 km altitude, 98.7 $^\circ $ inclination and a 10:30–11:30 Local Time at Descending Node. The EPT is an ionizing particle spectrometer that was designed based on a new concept and the most advanced signal processing technologies: it performs in-flight electron and ion discrimination and classifies each detected particle in its corresponding physical channels from which the incident spectrum can be readily reconstructed. The detector measures electron fluxes in the energy range 0.5–20 MeV, proton fluxes in the energy range 9.5–300 MeV and He-ion fluxes between 38 and 1200 MeV. The EPT is a modular configurable instrument with customizable maximum energy, field of view angle, geometrical factor and angular resolution. Therefore, the features of the currently flying instrument may slightly differ from those described in past or future configurations. After a description of the instrument along with the data acquisition and analysis procedures, the first particle fluxes measured by the EPT will be shown and discussed. The web-site located at http://web.csr.ucl.ac.be/csr_web/probav/ which daily displays measured fluxes and other related studies will also be briefly described.