SMILE, the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer, is a joint science mission between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The spacecraft will be uniquely equipped to study the interaction between the Earth’s magnetosphere-ionosphere system and the solar wind on a global scale. SMILE’s instruments will explore this science through imaging of the solar wind...
PLAnetary Transits and Ocillations (PLATO) is the third European Space Agency (ESA) medium class mission in ESA’s cosmic vision programme due for launch in 2025. PLATO will carry out high precision un-interrupted photometric monitoring (months to years) in the visible band of large samples of bright solar-type stars. The primary mission goal is to detect and characterise terrestrial exoplanets...
The Visible imager instrument (VIS) on board the Euclid mission will deliver high resolution shape measurements of galaxies down to very faint limits (R~25 at 10$\sigma$) in a large part of the sky, in order to infer the distribution of Dark Matter in the Universe. To mitigate radiation damage effects that will accumulate in the detectors over the mission lifetime, the properties of the...
ESA are planning an L-class mission to Jupiter called JUICE (JUpiter Icy Moons Explorer) in June 2022. Its objective is to explore in detail Jupiter and the Jovian magnetosphere as it currently represents an archetype of gas giant planetary systems. 11 scientific instruments have been selected to fly on JUICE, of which PEP (Particle Environment Package) is one. PEP will deliver a 3D view of...
It has become increasingly clear in recent years that dynamic charge
collection effects (notably the "brighter-fatter" effect) are evident and of
interest in thick CCDs. Apart from the implications of these effects on
shape measurement of point sources, and the unclear sensitivity of their
dependence on factors such as incident wavelength and device operating
voltage, it is also somewhat...
