ESA's Space Environments and Effects Section maintains a computational facility used for analysis of space environments (energetic particle radiation, plasmas, atmospheres, micro-particles, contamination, etc.) and their effects on space systems including the acquisition and analysis of in-flight data and the development of environment and effects models.
Responsibilities include:
The instrumentation provided by this facility provides in-situ measurements of the space environment. This data is provided publicly and provides external B2B entities with data to characterise the environment, providing the necessary inputs for spacecraft anomaly analyses, in flight degradation calculations, verification of space environment models, the development of new models and to provide boundary conditions for physical simulations of the environment.
The external computational infrastructure of the facility provides a source for this data, as well as a resource for collaborative efforts for development of simulation and modelling software, such as Geant4 Radiation Analysis for Space (GRAS), Network of Models (NoM), Open Data Interface (ODI), etc through an SVN and GitHub service.
Domains of responsibility
The 3DEES instrument is a space radiation spectrometer capable of measuring energetic electron (and optionally proton) spectra within the 0.1 – 10 MeV range in 32 energy bins and 3D angular distribution (at least 6 angles distributed within 2 planes) with a resolution for each looking direction better than 20°. The 3DEES concept is based on various charged particle detection principles including ΔE-E telescope principle, the inclined sensor concept. Protons and ions are detected by the instrument and are so cleanly identified that they cannot contaminate the electron spectra. The 3DEES instrument is composed of 1 – 3 Panoramic Spectrometer Modules (PSM), each of which is composed of a Docking Module (DM) to which 2 – 3 Orthogonal Sensor Modules (OSM) are electronically connected.
Mass
~5 kg
Power
~5 W
Dimensions
155 mm × 243 mm × 186 mm (h×w×l)