Recent achievements on ASPIICS, an externally occulted coronagraph for PROBA-3
2016
This paper presents the current status of ASPIICS, a solar coronagraph that is the primary payload of ESA’s formation
flying in-orbit demonstration mission PROBA-3.
The “sonic region” of the Sun corona remains extremely difficult to observe with spatial resolution and sensitivity
sufficient to understand the fine scale phenomena that govern the quiescent solar corona, as well as phenomena that lead
to coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which influence space weather. Improvement on this front requires eclipse-like
conditions over long observation times. The space-borne coronagraphs flown so far provided a continuous coverage of
the external parts of the corona but their over-occulting system did not permit to analyse the part of the white-light
corona where the main coronal mass is concentrated.
The PROBA-3 Coronagraph System, also known as ASPIICS (Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging
Investigation of the Corona of the Sun) is designed as a classical externally occulted Lyot coronagraph but it takes
advantage of the opportunity to place the external occulter on a companion spacecraft, about 150m apart, to perform high
resolution imaging of the inner corona of the Sun as close as ~1.1 solar radii. The images will be tiled and compressed on
board in an FPGA before being down-linked to ground for scientific analyses.
ASPIICS is built by a large European consortium including about 20 partners from 7 countries under the auspices of the
European Space Agency. This paper is reviewing the recent development status of the ASPIICS instrument as it is
approaching CDR.
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