The Solar Orbiter Mission: an Energetic Particle Perspective
Abstract
Solar Orbiter is a joint ESA-NASA mission planed for launch in October 2018. The science payload includes remote-sensing and in-situ instrumentation designed with the primary goal of understanding how the Sun creates and controls the heliosphere. The spacecraft will follow an elliptical orbit around the Sun, with perihelion as close as 0.28 AU. During the late orbit phase the orbital plane will reach inclinations above 30 degrees, allowing direct observations of the solar polar regions. The Energetic Particle Detector (EPD) is an instrument suite consisting of several sensors measuring electrons, protons and ions over a broad energy interval (2 keV to 15 MeV for electrons, 3 keV to 100 MeV for protons and few tens of keV/nuc to 450 MeV/nuc for ions), providing composition, spectra, timing and anisotropy information. We present an overview of Solar Orbiter from the energetic particle perspective, summarizing the capabilities of EPD and the opportunities that these new observations will provide for understanding how energetic particles are accelerated during solar eruptions and how they propagate through the Heliosphere.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1701.04057,
title = {The Solar Orbiter Mission: an Energetic Particle Perspective},
author = {R. Gómez-Herrero and J. Rodríguez-Pacheco and R. F. Wimmer-Schweingruber and G. M. Mason and S. Sánchez-Prieto and C. Martín and M. Prieto and G. C. Ho and F. Espinosa Lara and I. Cernuda and J. J. Blanco and A. Russu and O. Rodríguez Polo and S. R. Kulkarni and C. Terasa and L. Panitzsch and S. I. Böttcher and S. Boden and B. Heber and J. Steinhagen and J. Tammen and J. Köhler and C. Drews and R. Elftmann and A. Ravanbakhsh and L. Seimetz and B. Schuster and M. Yedla and E. Valtonen and R. Vainio},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.04057},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
XXV ECRS 2016 Proceedings - eConf C16-09-04.3