Space Systems Environmental Interaction Studies

摘要

This report describes the objectives and summarizes the outcome, of the work performed under this contract. In addition, and this constitutes the major portion of the report, a comprehensive summary of all the important design elements for the anticipated DIDM-3 instrument is presented herein. As the final effort of the contract, all of the various facets to designing and building a Digital Ion Drift Meter for inclusion in the Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (CINOPS) spacecraft's instrument suite, within the imposed size and power constraints, and capable of realizing the desired measurement performance, were looked at and analyzed. An instrument design featuring a Backgammon type anode with four charge amplifiers and four Digital Pulse Processors (DPP) was examined in-depth, in order to determine the following: (i) if a design can be produced which provides optimal performance, and (ii) whether the design provided adequate imaging resolution for the drift measurements. The design optimization efforts were reported on in a previous AFRL publication (AFRL-VS-TR-2001-1660). An indication of the expected measurement accuracy and resolution is included here.