US Contributions to the Plasma Observatory Mission

Plasma Observatory (PO) is a Heliophysics mission that will explore plasma energization and energy transport in the Earth’s Magnetospheric System, for the first time through multi-scale observations covering simultaneously the ion and fluid scales. PO is currently in a competitive ESA Phase A study as one of the three candidates for the future ESA M7 mission. From its  equatorial, 8 by 18 R_E (geocentric perigee and apogee, respectively, in Earth radii), 15^o inclination orbit, PO will  addresses the following science questions: (Q1) how particles are energized in space plasmas and (Q2) which processes dominate energy transport and drive coupling across regions of Earth’s magnetosphere. The aforementioned science questions being pursued by PO are aligned with the goals of NASA’s SMD^3,4: to understand the physical processes, and Sun-Earth connections. The PO baseline mission will achieve this objective with a comprehensively instrumented mother spacecraft (MSC) or mothercraft, and six identical smallsat daughtercraft (DSC). After highly successful missions such as Cluster, Themis, and MMS, this will be the next logical step to gain transformative insights into fundamental processes of the Magnetospheric System.

 

A team of US scientists from three major institutions will provide significant parts of three instruments for the P.O. payload.  UNH (University of New Hampshire) will provide the time-of-flight and detector section and some electronics for the Ion Mass Spectrometer (IMS-M) that will measure the 3D distributions of (H⁺ , He⁺ , He⁺⁺ and O⁺ ) at high time resolution. This ion spectrometer will be placed on the mothercraft. The University of Berkeley (UCB) will provide  the spin-plane double-probe electric field sensors of the electric field instrument EFI-M onboard the mothercraft,  based on the ones flown on RBSP. The University of California in Los Angeles will be providing the mechanical design of the detectors, telescopes and electronics box, and the design of the power and digital processing electronics boards for the energetic particle instrument EPE-D on each of the six daughtercraft, based on heritage from the ELFIN mission.  These contributions are critical for the success of the PO mission and its science return. The US team is currently collaborating with the PO consortium in the ESAPhase A study to determine how to efficiently provide the payload that will return the best quantity measurements.  In this presentation we will introduce the capability of these instruments and the current achievements and progress that were obtained during the ongoing phase A study.