Recent advances in electronics and software for the METIS coronagraph aboard solar orbiter

METIS is a visible and UV externally inversely occulted coronagraph selected to fly aboard the Solar Orbiter space mission. Thanks to its own capabilities and exploiting the peculiar opportunities offered by the SO mission profile, the instrument will address some of the still open issues in understanding the physics driving the observed processes in the corona and characterizing the slow and fast components of the solar wind. Recently the METIS design went thorough a significant revision involving the overall electronics configuration and software functionalities, comprehensive of descoping of some features but also aiming at the improvement of the instrument’s reliability. As a result the electronics architecture has been simplified enabling an effective cold-strapped redundancy scheme of some subsystems, while the preliminary SW database has been defined as well. We also identified the scientific processing algorithms implementing the instrument functionalities and the imagecompression capabilities able to match the selected HW resources providing an optimal compromise between complexity and compression ratio. This paper describes the revised electronics and software design developed in order to maximize the overall scientific returns with the updated instrument configuration approaching the Phases C/D of the project.

[1]  P. Nicolosi,et al.  The Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectrometer for the solar and heliospheric observatory , 1995 .

[2]  Silvano Fineschi,et al.  KPol: liquid crystal polarimeter for K-corona observations from the SCORE coronagraph , 2005, SPIE Optics + Photonics.

[3]  Giampiero Naletto,et al.  Novel space coronagraphs: METIS, a flexible optical design for multi-wavelength imaging and spectroscopy , 2013, Optics & Photonics - Optical Engineering + Applications.

[4]  Giampiero Naletto,et al.  Optimization of the occulter for the Solar Orbiter/METIS coronagraph , 2012, Other Conferences.

[5]  Piergiorgio Nicolosi,et al.  The Data Processing Electronics of the METIS Coronagraph aboard the ESA Solar Orbiter Mission , 2012 .

[6]  Silvano Fineschi,et al.  Electro-optical polarimeters for ground-based and space-based observations of the solar K-corona , 2012, Other Conferences.

[7]  Thuy Mai,et al.  Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) , 2015 .

[8]  Giampiero Naletto,et al.  Preliminary occulter optimization for an innovative space coronagraph , 2012 .

[9]  Giampiero Naletto,et al.  METIS: a novel coronagraph design for the Solar Orbiter mission , 2012, Other Conferences.

[10]  G.,et al.  MESSI, the METIS instrument Software Simulator , 2012 .

[11]  W. Pesnell,et al.  The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) , 2012 .

[12]  G. Naletto,et al.  A prototype of the UV detector for METIS on Solar Orbiter , 2012, Other Conferences.

[13]  Giampiero Naletto,et al.  Multi Element Telescope for Imaging and Spectroscopy (METIS) coronagraph for the Solar Orbiter mission , 2012, Other Conferences.

[14]  P. Nicolosi,et al.  The processing and power unit of the METIS coronagraph aboard the Solar Orbiter space mission , 2012, Other Conferences.

[15]  Tero Siili,et al.  10 Years of soho , 2006 .

[16]  Giampiero Naletto,et al.  Ultraviolet and Visible-light Coronagraphic Imager (UVCI) , 2003, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation.

[17]  G. Noci,et al.  Solar wind diagnostics from Doppler-enhanced scattering , 1987 .

[18]  Silvano Fineschi,et al.  Imaging polarimetry with the METIS coronagraph of the Solar Orbiter mission , 2012, Other Conferences.

[19]  Piergiorgio Nicolosi,et al.  SiC/Mg multilayer coatings for SCORE coronagraph: long term stability analysis , 2011, Optical Engineering + Applications.

[20]  P. Nicolosi,et al.  The solar orbiter METIS coronagraph data signal processing chain , 2011, Optical Systems Design.