MAVEN SupraThermal and Thermal Ion Compostion (STATIC) Instrument
By J. Mcfadden, O. Kortmann, David W. Curtis, G. Dalton, G. Johnson, R. Abiad, R. Sterling, K. Hatch, P. Berg, C. Tiu and 6 more. 2015
304 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The MAVEN SupraThermal And Thermal Ion Compostion (STATIC) instrument is designed to measure the ion composition and distribution function of the cold Martian ionosphere, the heated suprathermal tail of this plasma in the upper ionosphere, and the pickup ions accelerated by solar wind electric fields. STATIC operates over an energy range of 0.1 eV up to 30 keV, with a base time resolution of 4 seconds. The instrument consists of a toroidal “top hat” electrostatic analyzer with a 360∘×90∘$360^{\circ} \times 90^{\circ}$ field-of-view, combined with a time-of-flight (TOF) velocity analyzer with 22.5∘$22.5^{\circ}$ resolution in the detection plane. The TOF combines a −15kV$-15~\mbox{kV}$ acceleration voltage with ultra-thin carbon foils to resolve H+$\mathrm{H}^{+}$, He++$\mathrm{He}^{++}$, He+$\mathrm{He}^{+}$, O+$\mathrm{O}^{+}$, O2+$\mathrm{O}_{2}^{+}$, and CO2+$\mathrm{CO}_{2}^{+}$ ions. Secondary electrons from carbon foils are detected by microchannel plate detectors and binned into a variety of data products with varying energy, mass, angle, and time resolution. To prevent detector saturation when measuring cold ram ions at periapsis (∼1011eV/cm2ssreV$\sim10^{1 1}~\mbox{eV/cm}^{2}\,\mbox{s}\,\mbox{sr}\,\mbox{eV}$), while maintaining adequate sensitivity to resolve tenuous pickup ions at apoapsis (∼103eV/cm2ssreV$\sim10^{3}~\mbox{eV/cm}^{2}\,\mbox{s}\,\mbox{sr}\,\mbox{eV}$), the sensor includes both mechanical and electrostatic attenuators that increase the dynamic range by a factor of 103$10^{3}$. This paper describes the instrument hardware, including several innovative improvements over previous TOF sensors, the ground calibrations of the sensor, the data products generated by the experiment, and some early measurements during cruise phase to Mars.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e8de238cdcb15114d2276b6f26d98fa75e8bbe4
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Citations in the corpus
- Loss of the Martian atmosphere to space: Present-day loss rates determined from MAVEN observations and integrated loss through time (2018, methodology): “MAVEN measures the composition and velocity of ions, using the STATIC instrument (McFadden et al., 2015).”
- The Solar Probe ANalyzer—Ions on the Parker Solar Probe (2021, background): “SPAN-I’s electrostatic analyzer (ESA) geometry draws its heritage from the STATIC instrument on the MAVEN spacecraft (McFadden et al. 2015).”
- The MAVEN Solar Wind Electron Analyzer (2016, methodology): “As an alternative, we can use START and STOP events in STATIC’s time-of-flight section to determine absolute efficiencies for that instrument.”