Welcome to the PROBA2 Science Center

The eclipse season has started for PROBA2, although not in all channels/instruments yet. Every winter, the solar (E/X)UV signals SWAP and LYRA observe are obscured by the Earth and Earth’s atmosphere. Earlier this week, we saw the first effects of the filtering by the Earth’s atmosphere in the two short-wavelength LYRA channels: Al and Zr. The long wavelength channels, neither SWAP show any effect yet but this will come very soon, later this week.

From October 12 10:30 till October 13 10:30 SWAP was in a so-called bake-out campaign with the telescope detector heated to 50C. In previous months, the sensitivity of the detector was slowly degrading (in the order of few %) . With the current bake-out campaign we attempt to reverse this degradation. The detector heating can possibly evaporate condensation from the detector or annihilate radiation induced crystal defects in the silicon of the detector. Future analysis will reveal if the bake-out campaign indeed has a positive effect.

On July 11, 2010, a total solar eclipse took place which on Earth could only be seen from the South Pacific Ocean and Easter Island. From the dawn-dusk orbit in which PROBA2 resides, the totality could not be seen, but the spacecraft did cross the lunar shadow path four times. As a result, SWAP and LYRA registered four partial eclipses in five hours time. Enjoy the spectacle in the SWAP movie below.

On June 22, 2010, a PROBA2 workshop took place at ESA/ESTEC to review the status of the spacecraft, onboard technology demonstrators and instruments after 8 months in space.

Several colleagues of the PROBA2 Science Center participated and presented SWAP, LYRA and the Science Center located at the Royal Observatory in Belgium.

This event attracted the following press attention:

The P2SC team is very excited to announce that on 14 December 2009 the door of the SWAP telescope onboard PROBA2 was opened successfully. The first solar images confirmed that the detector and filters are working fine. During the Christmas holidays the SWAP instrument is put in storage. Early January, the procedure will start to open the LYRA covers as well.

Details about the first results of PROBA2 will be given during a press event on the 26th of January 2010 at the Royal Observatory of Belgium.

During its second week in orbit, ESA confirms that all systems are operating as expected. Shortly after establishing its orbit, PROBA2 was able to stabilize itself using an on-board magnetometer, and, more recently fired up the star-tracking cameras that the spacecraft will use to autonomously orient itself in space.