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The PLATO project has reached a new stage in the development at IAS of the calibration structure for the flight cameras. The validation tests of the installations started at the beginning of March, on cryogenic vacuum infrastructures deployed in the Saturn thermal chamber, at the IAS calibration station. All the tests have just been successfully completed.
The IDOC (Integrated Operation and Data Center) platform at IAS has just assigned DOIs for 83 numerical codes and datasets it hosts. A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a character string that uniquely and permanently identifies an electronic resource.
Solar Orbiter’s latest images shows the full Sun in unprecedented detail. They were taken on 7 March, at a distance of roughly 75 million kilometres, half way between the Earth and Sun. One of the images, taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) is the highest resolution image of the Sun’s full disc and outer atmosphere, the corona, ever taken. Another image, taken by the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument, represents the first full Sun image of its kind in 50 years, and by far the best one, taken at the Lyman-beta wavelength of ultraviolet light that is emitted by hydrogen gas.
The PLATO project at IAS has reached a new stage in the development of the flight camera calibration structure. Indeed, after an intense phase of studies, development, and tuning of the integration and validation activities, the validation tests of the cryogenic and vacuum elements around and inside the Saturn tank are starting this week. All the infrastructures and the control/command for this cryogenic test have been realized under the responsibility of the calibration station team.
Nano-diamonds remain an enigmatic component of cosmic dust. A significant fraction of the pre-solar nano-diamonds extracted from primitive meteorites were associated with distant exploding stars (supernovae). While they have been found in many Solar System bodies, they have been detected in only two proto-planetery disks and one evolved star, and they have never been observed in the interstellar medium. Newly-derived nano-diamond optical constants generated with the THEMIS dust model developed at IAS explain why it is hard to observe nano-diamonds in space.
