ARTEMIS Science Objectives

NASA??s two spacecraft ARTEMIS mission will address both heliospheric and planetary research questions, first while in orbit about the Earth with the Moon and subsequently while in orbit about the Moon. Heliospheric topics include the structure of the Earth??s magnetotail; reconnection, particle acceleration, and turbulence in the Earth??s magnetosphere, at the bow shock, and in the solar wind; and the formation and structure of the lunar wake. Planetary topics include the lunar exosphere and its relationship to the composition of the lunar surface, the effects of electric fields on dust in the exosphere, internal structure of the Moon, and the lunar crustal magnetic field. This paper describes the expected contributions of ARTEMIS to these baseline scientific objectives.     

The Galileo Heavy element monitor

The Heavy Ion Counter on the Galileo spacecraft will monitor energetic heavy nuclei of the elements from C to Ni, with energies from 6 to 200 MeV nucl^-1. The instrument will provide measurements of trapped heavy ions in the Jovian magnetosphere, including those high-energy heavy ions with the potential for affecting the operation of the spacecraft electronic circuitry. We describe the instrument, which is a modified version of the Voyager CRS instrument.     

Pickup protons in the heliosphere

We calculate the conditions of pickup protons inside the termination shock. Outside 50 AU the partial pressure of pickup protons is greater than the magnetic pressure by a factor of > 10, and greater than the partial pressure of solar wind protons by a factor of > 100. Thus, pickup protons have a significant dynamical influence on the structures of the solar wind in the outer heliosphere.     

用于粘性可压缩流动数值计算的SIMPLE方法

对SIMPLE方法加以推广,使之适用于可压缩粘性流动的数值计算。采用非交错网格技术,推出三维任意曲线坐标系下可压缩形式SIMPLE方法的计算方程。对亚音速、跨音速及超音速等5个流场进行了数值计算并与有关文献及实验数据进行比较。      

Multi-Spectral Imager on the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission

A multispectral imager has been developed for a rendezvous mission with the near-Earth asteroid, 433 Eros. The Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI) on the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft uses a five-element refractive optical telescope, has a field of view of 2.93 × 2.25°, a focal length of 167.35 mm, and has a spatial resolution of 16.1 × 9.5 m at a range of 100 km. The spectral sensitivity of the instrument spans visible to near infrared wavelengths, and was designed to provide insight into the nature and fundamental properties of asteroids and comets. Seven narrow band spectral filters were chosen to provide multicolor imaging and to make comparative studies with previous observations of S asteroids and measurements of the characteristic absorption in Fe minerals near 1 µm. An eighth filter with a much wider spectral passband will be used for optical navigation and for imaging faint objects, down to visual magnitude of +10.5. The camera has a fixed 1 Hz frame rate and the signal intensities are digitized to 12 bits. The detector, a Thomson-CSF TH7866A Charge-Coupled Device, permits electronic shuttering which effectively varies the dynamic range over an additional three orders of magnitude. Communication with the NEAR spacecraft occurs via a MIL-STD-1553 bus interface, and a high speed serial interface permits rapid transmission of images to the spacecraft solid state recorder. Onboard image processing consists of a multi-tiered data compression scheme. The instrument was extensively tested and calibrated prior to launch; some inflight calibrations have already been completed. This paper presents a detailed overview of the Multi-Spectral Imager and its objectives, design, construction, testing and calibration.     

THE DIGITAL WAVE-PROCESSING EXPERIMENT ON CLUSTER

The wide variety of geophysical plasmas that will be investigated by the Cluster mission contain waves with a frequency range from DC to over 100 kHz with both magnetic and electric components. The characteristic duration of these waves extends from a few milliseconds to minutes and a dynamic range of over 90 dB is desired. All of these factors make it essential that the on-board control system for the Wave-Experiment Consortium (WEC) instruments be flexible so as to make effective use of the limited spacecraft resources of power and telemetry-information bandwidth. The Digital Wave Processing Experiment, (DWP), will be flown on Cluster satellites as a component of the WEC. DWP will coordinate WEC measurements as well as perform particle correlations in order to permit the direct study of wave/particle interactions. The DWP instrument employs a novel architecture based on the use of transputers with parallel processing and re-allocatable tasks to provide a high-reliability system. Members of the DWP team are also providing sophisticated electrical ground support equipment, for use during development and testing by the WEC. This is described further in Pedersen et al. (this issue).     

Using Precise Solar Limb Shape Measurements to Study the Solar Cycle

Despite 20 years of total solar irradiance measurements from space, the lack of high precision spatially resolved observations limits definitive answers to even simple questions like ``Are the solar irradiance changes caused solely by magnetic fields perturbing the radiative flux at the photosphere?" More subtle questions like how the aspheric structure of the sun changes with the magnetic cycle are only now beginning to be addressed with new tools like p-mode helioseismology. Solar 5-min oscillation studies have yielded precise information on the mean radial interior solar structure and some knowledge about the rotational and thermal solar asphericity. Unfortunately this progress has not been enough to generate a self-consistent theory for why the solar irradiance and luminosity vary with the magnetic cycle. We need sharper tools to describe and understand the sun's global aspheric response to its internal dynamo, and we need to be able to measure the solar cycle manifestation of the magnetic cycle on entropy transport from the interior to the photosphere in much the same way that we study the fundamentally more complex problem of magnetic flux transport from the solar interior. A space experiment called the Solar Physics Explorer for Radius, Irradiance and Shape (SPHERIS) and in particular its Astrometric and Photometric Telescope (APT) component will accomplish these goals.

     

Reconstruction of Target Reflecting Surface Using Differential Geometry

A procedure based on the envelope concept of differential geometry is described that permits the reconstruction of the contour of a smooth, moving, conducting target, satisfying the geometrical optics approximation. The target reflections are assumed to be specular in nature with either one reflection point or multiple resolvable reflection points. The time variation of the range to the reflection point of the target (assumed derivable from a high-resolution radar) and the general motion of the target (assumed derivable from tracking or trajectory information) are employed to reconstruct the contour of that portion of the assumed target surface that is illuminated by the radar. The reconstruction is accomplished by the simultaneous solution of two nonlinear differential equations which are derived using the envelope concept of differential geometry. Several reconstruction examples based on computer analysis are presented which indicate the results obtainable using this method.