The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager Investigation for the IMAGE Mission

The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUV) of the IMAGE Mission will study the distribution of He in Earth’s plasmasphere by detecting its resonantly-scattered emission at 30.4 nm. It will record the structure and dynamics of the cold plasma in Earth’s plasmasphere on a global scale. The 30.4-nm feature is relatively easy to measure because it is the brightest ion emission from the plasmasphere, it is spectrally isolated, and the background at that wavelength is negligible. Measurements are easy to interpret because the plasmaspheric He emission is optically thin, so its brightness is directly proportional to the He column abundance. Effective imaging of the plasmaspheric He requires global “snapshots” in which the high apogee and the wide field of view of EUV provide in a single exposure a map of the entire plasmasphere. EUV consists of three identical sensor heads, each having a field of view 30◦ in diameter. These sensors are tilted relative to one another to cover a fan-shaped field of 84◦ × 30◦, which is swept across the plasmasphere by the spin of the satellite. EUV’s spatial resolution is 0.6◦ or ∼ 0.1 RE in the equatorial plane seen from apogee. The sensitivity is 1.9 count sec−1 Rayleigh−1, sufficient to map the position of the plasmapause with a time resolution of 10 minutes.