Date

4-2016

Project Type

URC Presentation

College or School

CEPS

Class Year

Senior

Department

Physics

Major

Physics

Faculty Research Advisor

Eberhard Moebius

Second Faculty Research Advisor

Harald Kucharek

Third Faculty Research Advisor

Lynn Kistler

Abstract

The Earth magnetosphere is the volume of space formed by the Earth magnetic field in response to the flow of plasma from the solar wind. Although the magnetopause shields us from the solar wind, there is still an interaction, and particles penetrate with energy, and momentum into the Earths magnetosphere and interact with the Earth’s magnetic field to create various plasmas and currents in the magnetosphere. The study of the dynamics of ions in and outside of the magnetosphere is done through mass spectrometry. For more than 15 years the CLUSTER/CODIF provided outstanding data to understand the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere. This detector is a Time-Of-Flight (TOF) detector provides the composition and the 3D ion distributions for hydrogen, helium and oxygen. However, the efficiency of the CODIF decreased with time due to reduced gain of the Micro Channel Plates (MCP) detectors. In this study, we have tested four different configurations of the MCP’s in the instrument and determined both the output charge from the MCP and the efficiency of the overall instrument. Here we present the results of this study to determine the optimum MCP configuration. This study will be used to optimize the design of sensors which will be a flown on future missions.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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