Wide-angle geocoronal telescope: a He-II 304-A plasmaspheric imager

Daniel M. Cotton; Robert A. Conant; Supriya Chakrabarti

doi:10.1117/12.155598

1 December 1993 Wide-angle geocoronal telescope: a He-II 304-Å plasmaspheric imager

Daniel M. Cotton, Robert A. Conant, Supriya Chakrabarti

Author Affiliations +

Optical Engineering, Vol. 32, Issue 12, (December 1993). https://doi.org/10.1117/12.155598

Abstract

We describe the wide-angle geocoronal telescope (WIDGET). The telescope is designed to image resonantly scattered solar He-II 304-Å emission from the cold plasma constituent of the magnetosphere, the plasmasphere. It is a prime-focus telescope consisting of a spherical normal incidence f/2 mirror and a microchannel plate imaging detector. The instrument has a 30-deg field of view with a 0.5- to 1-deg angular resolution and a peak sensitivity of approximately 0.5 counts s^-1 rayleigh^-1 bin^-1. The instrument was flown on a sounding rocket on 27 October 1992 to test its capabilities. Unfortunately, no useful data were recovered due to a failure in the low-voltage system. (It was scheduled for reflight in October 1993.) WIDGET was designed so that it could easily be adapted to different wavelengths (584, 834, and 1216Å) by means of suitable mirror coatings and filters. In this way, a series of WIDGETs could image different aspects of the inner magnetosphere simultaneously, thus providing a more unified picture of this complex region.

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Daniel M. Cotton, Robert A. Conant, and Supriya Chakrabarti "Wide-angle geocoronal telescope: a He-II 304-Å plasmaspheric imager," Optical Engineering 32(12), (1 December 1993). https://doi.org/10.1117/12.155598

Published: 1 December 1993

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