A LOW ENERGY PARTICLE SENSOR FOR IONOSPHERIC MEASUREMENTS
- Paper ID
IAF-92-0757
- author
- company
COM DEV Ltd.,
- country
Canada
- year
1992
- abstract
A particle sensor has been developed to monitor the very low energy plasma in the earth’s ionosphere. The instrument is based on a small electrostatic analyzer that is deployed from the satellite into the plasma. The instrument, Cold Plasma Analyzer, will be launched in late 1992 on the Swedish scientific satellite FREJA. This will be the first time for measuring atmospheric plasma well below 10 eV. This is a key feature of the instrument, since most of the ionospheric plasma constituents have energies of approximately 1 eV. The paper describes the system design and instrument development for this state-of-the-art analyzer, including examples of the unique problems and requirements which impacted on the system design. Preliminary results are presented which demonstrate the imaging and energy dispersion features of the ion-optics.