Visible, externally occulted coronagraph for Solar Orbiter

The SIde-Looking Coronagraph (SILC) is one of the solar remote-sensing instruments proposed for the payload of the Solar Orbiter mission. The Solar Orbiter is a mission selected in September 2000 by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the definition study phase. The Solar Orbiter will describe elliptic orbits with a large range of heliocentric distance, from 0.21 to 0.6 AU (astronomical units), that is a factor 3 for the geometric conditions and will reach heliographic latitudes as high as 38 degrees. Furthermore, the spacecraft will have offset pointing capability so as to target any point of the solar disk. These constraints (in addition to the severe thermal environment) lead us to propose an externally occulted coronagraph entirely protected from direct sunlight by remaining in the shadow of the spacecraft and looking sideways. The optical design follows the general principles of an externally-occulted coronagraph adapted to the side-looking concept. Although SILC loses the full spatial coverage of the corona, it can observe the inner part of the corona (down to 1.5R) during the whole mission and compensate the off-pointing of the spacecraft in the two directions. The performances, resulting from ray-tracing calculations, are presented here together with the expected stray light level.