The ion and Electron Plasma Camera of the Plasma Observatory Mission

The ion and Electron Plasma Camera (iEPC) onboard the Plasma Observatory mission will provide the 3D velocity distribution function of thermal and supra-thermal ions and electrons in the 10 eV to 25 keV energy range with 12% energy resolution, 22.5° angle resolution, and at 250 ms cadence. It will be deployed on all the 7 satellites of the mission, allowing the first characterization of multi-scale particle acceleration processes in space plasmas. We present the capability of the iEPC instrument concept, which is based on the donut analyser topology (Morel et al., 2017), further optimized for the Plasma Obervatory mission (Hénaff and Berthomier, jgr 2025), and tested at LPP (Hénaff et al, jgr 2025). The iEPC is the first plasma spectrometer with a 3D instantaneous field-of-view with 128 look directions in an energy range relevant for magnetospheric plasmas. Altough being a very compact sensor, the iEPC geometric factor reaches 10-3 cm2.sr.eV/eV per look direction, which will provide excellent counting statistics, even in the dilute magnetospheric plasmas.