Speaker
Description
For ultra-large constellation missions (greater than 1,000 spacecraft) to be feasible, each instrument on each spacecraft must be compact, low-cost, easy to manufacture, and require minimal resources. For low-energy plasma instruments, these constraints apply to both the plasma spectrometer and the particle detector. The ideal particle detector operates at low-voltage, is light-blind, and has an energy detection threshold of tens of eV. Here we present results from tests of an eight-pixel, silicon strip detector and a single pixel, solar-blind, diamond detector. The solid state detector successfully detected electrons down 4 keV and the diamond detector also had a detection threshold of 4 keV. The solid-state detector was a commercially available, 500 m thick, Canberra PF-8CT-13*18 detector with a dead layer less than 50 nm thick. The diamond detector was a three-layer, diamond detector manufactured by Advent Diamond with an Aluminum coating. As expected, with a bandgap of 5.45 eV, the diamond detector was insensitive to ambient light. Custom-built, charge sensitive pulse shaping circuitry was used for both detectors with slight component value differences implemented for biasing and detector capacitance compensation. Here we present measurements of the detector response versus electron beam energy and beam current.