The Sunrise Ultraviolet Spectropolarimeter and Imager: Instrument description
Abstract
The third science flight of the balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise carries three entirely new post-focus science instruments with spectropolarimetric capabilities, concurrently covering an extended spectral range from the near ultraviolet to the near infrared. Sampling a larger height range, from the low photosphere to the chromosphere, with the sub-arcsecond resolution provided by the 1-m Sunrise telescope, is key in understanding critical small-scale phenomena which energetically couple different layers of the solar atmosphere. The Sunrise Ultraviolet Spectropolarimeter and Imager (SUSI) operates between 309 nm and 417 nm. A key feature of SUSI is its capability to record up to several hundred spectral lines simultaneously without the harmful effects of the Earth's atmosphere. The rich SUSI spectra can be exploited in terms of many-line inversions. Another important innovation of the instrument is the synchronized 2D context imaging which allows to numerically correct the spectrograph scans for residual optical aberrations. In this work we describe the main design aspects of SUSI, the instrument characterization and testing, and finally its operation, expected performance and data products.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.05416,
title = {The Sunrise Ultraviolet Spectropolarimeter and Imager: Instrument description},
author = {A. Feller and A. Gandorfer and B. Grauf and J. Hölken and F. A. Iglesias and A. Korpi-Lagg and T. L. Riethmüller and J. Staub and G. Fernandez-Rico and J. S. Castellanos Durán and S. K. Solanki and H. N. Smitha and K. Sant and P. Barthol and M. Bayon Laguna and M. Bergmann and J. Bischoff and J. Bochmann and S. Bruns and W. Deutsch and M. Eberhardt and R. Enge and S. Goodyear and K. Heerlein and J. Heinrichs and D. Hirche and S. Meining and R. Mende and S. Meyer and M. Mühlhaus and M. F. Müller and K. Monecke and D. Oberdorfer and I. Papagiannaki and S. Ramanath and M. Vergöhl and D. Vukadinović and S. Werner and K. Zerr and A. Bell and T. Berkefeld and P. Bernasconi and M. Carpenter and Y. Katsukawa and J. C. del Toro Iniesta and A. Álvarez Herrero and M. Kubo and V. Martínez Pillet and D. Orozco Suárez},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05416},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
46 pages, 18 figures; to be published in Solar Physics Topical Collection "The Sunrise III Solar Observatory" (https://link.springer.com/collections/jegdciedig)