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HERSCHEL/SCORE, imaging the solar corona in visible and EUV light: CCD camera characterization

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Abstract

The HERSCHEL (helium resonant scattering in the corona and heliosphere) experiment is a rocket mission that was successfully launched last September from White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, USA. HERSCHEL was conceived to investigate the solar corona in the extreme UV (EUV) and in the visible broadband polarized brightness and provided, for the first time, a global map of helium in the solar environment. The HERSCHEL payload consisted of a telescope, HERSCHEL EUV Imaging Telescope (HEIT), and two coronagraphs, HECOR (helium coronagraph) and SCORE (sounding coronagraph experiment). The SCORE instrument was designed and developed mainly by Italian research institutes and it is an imaging coronagraph to observe the solar corona from 1.4 to 4 solar radii. SCORE has two detectors for the EUV lines at 121.6 nm (HI) and 30.4 nm (HeII) and the visible broadband polarized brightness. The SCORE UV detector is an intensified CCD with a microchannel plate coupled to a CCD through a fiber-optic bundle. The SCORE visible light detector is a frame-transfer CCD coupled to a polarimeter based on a liquid crystal variable retarder plate. The SCORE coronagraph is described together with the performances of the cameras for imaging the solar corona.

During an eclipse the Sun shows a bright region surrounding its disk: the solar corona. The corona is composed by a continuous flux of charged particles that leave the Sun surface and spread all over the space. This flux is known as the solar wind and our planet is wrapped by this breeze of particles. The temperature of the solar corona is surprisingly high, and the most part of emitted radiation falls into ultraviolet band. Studying the dynamic processes driving the solar wind is not only relevant to understand how our star works, but also for the safety of our own lives

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Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Ziyu Wu and Augusto Marcelli for having invited one of us (M.P.) to the ITSR09 conference, giving great opportunity to discuss this work. We express our gratitude to the NRL scientific and technical team for the invaluable support during calibration and testing of SCORE, for the fruitful discussions on the topic, and for having offered us their experience. This work is supported by the Italian Space Agency contract ASI/I/015/07.

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Correspondence to M. Pancrazzi.

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Pancrazzi, M., Focardi, M., Landini, F. et al. HERSCHEL/SCORE, imaging the solar corona in visible and EUV light: CCD camera characterization. Anal Bioanal Chem 397, 2033–2038 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-010-3697-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-010-3697-5

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