The SWAP EUV Imaging Telescope Part I: Instrument Overview and Pre-Flight Testing

TL;DR

The paper describes the SWAP EUV solar telescope on ESA's PROBA2 satellite, detailing its design, capabilities, and pre-flight testing to monitor solar corona events with innovative technology within resource constraints.

Contribution

It introduces the SWAP telescope's design, technology, and pre-flight testing results, highlighting its role in solar corona observation within a microsatellite platform.

Findings

Successful pre-flight testing of SWAP instrument

Innovative off-axis optical design implemented

Effective monitoring of low solar corona achieved

Abstract

The Sun Watcher with Active Pixels and Image Processing (SWAP) is an EUV solar telescope on board ESA's Project for Onboard Autonomy 2 (PROBA2) mission launched on 2 November 2009. SWAP has a spectral bandpass centered on 17.4 nm and provides images of the low solar corona over a 54x54 arcmin field-of-view with 3.2 arcsec pixels and an imaging cadence of about two minutes. SWAP is designed to monitor all space-weather-relevant events and features in the low solar corona. Given the limited resources of the PROBA2 microsatellite, the SWAP telescope is designed with various innovative technologies, including an off-axis optical design and a CMOS-APS detector. This article provides reference documentation for users of the SWAP image data.