Thermal Plasma Imager (TPI): An Imaging Thermal Ion Mass and 3-D Velocity Analyzer

Computer Science – Performance

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Scientific paper

The Thermal Plasma Imager (TPI) is an imaging thermal ion mass and 3-dimensional (3-D) velocity analyzer. It is designed to measure the instantaneous mass composition and detailed, mass-resolved, 3-dimensional, velocity distributions of thermal-energy (0.5-50 eV/q) ions on a 3-axis stabilized spacecraft. It consists of a pair of semi-toroidal deflection and fast-switching time-of-flight (TOF) electrodes, a hemispherical electrostatic analyzer (HEA), and a micro-channel plate (MCP) detector. It uses the TOF electrodes to clock the flight times of individual incident ions, and the HEA to focus ions of a given energy-per-charge and incident angle (elevation and azimuth) onto a single point on the MCP. The TOF/HEA combination produces an instantaneous and mass-resolved "image" of a 2-D cone of the 3-D velocity distribution for each ion species, and combines a sequence of concentric 2-D conical samples into a 3-D distribution covering 360° in azimuth and 120° in elevation. It is currently under development for the Enhanced Polar Outflow Probe (e-POP) and Planet-C Venus missions. It is an improved, "3-dimensional" version of the SS520-2 Thermal Suprathermal Analyzer (TSA), which samples ions in its entrance aperture plane and uses the spacecraft spin to achieve 3-D ion sampling. In this paper, we present its detailed design characteristics and prototype instrument performance, and compare these with the ion velocity measurement performances from its 2-D TSA predecessor on SS520-2.

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