Abstract
Recent solar flare explorations reveal the presence of high-frequency components in sub-THz and THz regime, which are much more intense, compared to the RF counterpart, and understanding of origin is still ambiguous. Solar flare observations in THz region need to be carried out from space since the atmospheric attenuation hinders measurements from ground. Present paper discusses, in detail, the development of a photometer that operates in THz region from 0.1 to 7 THz in different spectral bands. Entire electro-opto-mechanical design was carried to meet the size, mass, and power constraints posed by inherent resource limitations of Nanosatellite platforms. A Cassegrain optical configuration was designed to collect the sun radiation with aperture effective area of 0.0027 m2 with HDPE windows and resonant mesh filter for selective perception of THz radiation, rejecting the huge background of visible and NIR with a spectral selectivity of 107:1. Sensitivity of the photometer was estimated to be 9 K/mV by calibration against the blackbody radiator. The minimum detectable temperature transient of the instrument is 30.6 SFU (1 SFU = 1×10−22 Wm−2 Hz−1).
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Acknowledgements
The authors are thankful to Shri Ganesh Shanbhogue, Group Director, PPEG, LEOS, for providing financial grant for carrying out the work presented in this paper.
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Karanth, S.P. et al. (2020). Development of THz Photometer for Solar Flare Observation from Nanosatellite Platform. In: Sastry, P.S., CV, J., Raghavamurthy, D., Rao, S.S. (eds) Advances in Small Satellite Technologies. Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1724-2_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1724-2_24
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