EUV SpectroPhotometer (ESP) in Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE): Algorithms and Calibrations

The Extreme ultraviolet SpectroPhotometer (ESP) is one of five channels of the Extreme ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE) onboard the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The ESP channel design is based on a highly stable diffraction transmission grating and is an advanced version of the Solar Extreme ultraviolet Monitor (SEM), which has been successfully observing solar irradiance onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) since December 1995. ESP is designed to measure solar Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) irradiance in four first-order bands of the diffraction grating centered around 19 nm, 25 nm, 30 nm, and 36 nm, and in a soft X-ray band from 0.1 to 7.0 nm in the zeroth-order of the grating. Each band’s detector system converts the photo-current into a count rate (frequency). The count rates are integrated over 0.25-second increments and transmitted to the EVE Science and Operations Center for data processing. An algorithm for converting the measured count rates into solar irradiance and the ESP calibration parameters are described. The ESP pre-flight calibration was performed at the Synchrotron Ultraviolet Radiation Facility of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Calibration parameters were used to calculate absolute solar irradiance from the sounding-rocket flight measurements on 14 April 2008. These irradiances for the ESP bands closely match the irradiance determined for two other EUV channels flown simultaneously: EVE’s Multiple EUV Grating Spectrograph (MEGS) and SOHO’s Charge, Element and Isotope Analysis System/Solar EUV Monitor (CELIAS/SEM).