SWAP

PROBA2 was launched on November 2, 2009 and SWAP opened its door on December 14. Since then we are in the so-called commissioning phase in which every subsystem of the telescope, its electronics and its software is critically tested. Meanwhile thousands of images have been brought to the ground and handled by the PROBA2 Science Center. In this article we give a brief overview of all the fun we had in the past 7 weeks.

SWAP was developed by the Centre Spatial de Liège (CSL) and the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB). However various international partners participated in the realization of SWAP and continue to contribute in the scientific exploitation of the instrument.

The SWAP telescope (Sun Watcher using Active Pixel System detector and Image Processing) has been developed as part of the PROBA2 payload. SWAP is directly derived from the concept of the EIT telescope that we developed in the ’90s for the SOHO mission.