Superthermal Atom Imaging at <1 keV Energy

T E Moore, M R Collier, D Chornay, F A Herrero, J W Keller, K Ogilvie
  (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, phone: 301-286-5236)

S A Fuselier, A Ghielmetti (Lockheed Martin Adv. Tech. Ctr., Palo Alto, CA)

D C Hamilton (U. of Maryland, College Park, MD)

T Stephen (U. of Denver, Denver, CO)

J Quinn (U. of New Hampshire, Durham, NH)

P Wurz (U. of Bern, Bern, Switzerland)

The New Millennium Magnetosphere: Integrating Imaging, Discrete
  Observations, and Global Simulations, Sixth Huntsville Modeling Workshop,
  Guntersville, Alabama, 26-30 October 1998.


The "Imager for Magnetosphere-to-Aurora Global Exploration" (IMAGE)
spacecraft will be launched early in the year 2000 with the nominal
mission determining how the magnetosphere changes in response to solar
storms. IMAGE will carry a complement of six instruments to perform
radio plasma imaging, neutral atom imaging, and ultraviolet imaging at
FUV and EUV wavelengths. The low energy neutral atom imager, or LENA,
combines space flight-proven techniques with a neutral-to-negative ion
surface conversion technology to image the composition (H and O) and
energy distributions (10 to 750 eV) of neutral atom flux. LENA uses
electrostatic optics techniques for energy discrimination and carbon
foil-based time of flight techniques for mass discrimination. It has
a 90 degree x 360 degree field-of-view comprised of 12 x 45 pixels,
each nominally 8 degrees x 8 degrees. LENA is designed to detect fast
neutral atom fluxes in its energy range, emitted by the terrestrial
auroral zone, the sun, or penetrating from the interstellar medium,
and so image the distribution of low energy plasma heating processes
in the heliosphere. Potential future applications of LENA imaging
technologies to remote sensing of plasma heating in other contexts
will be briefly described.