Solar flares, intense bursts of radiation, can disrupt the atmosphere and potentially affect communication, navigation and electrical systems. A newly developed miniaturised microwave radiometer used on a space-borne ...Solar flares, intense bursts of radiation, can disrupt the atmosphere and potentially affect communication, navigation and electrical systems. A newly developed miniaturised microwave radiometer used on a space-borne platform should offer astronomers unprecedented understanding of the largest explosive phenomena in our solar system. In this paper the activity and results of the EU funded research project FLARES are presented. Objective of FLARES has been the study, analysis and design of millimetre-wave system-on-chip (SoC) radiometers for space-borne detection of solar flares. Thanks to the proposed methodology, the power consumption and encumbrance (volume, weight) of the instrument can be sensibly reduced when compared to the devices currently in operation for observing and studying solar flares. In particular, the proposed SoC Dicke radiometer can achieve a ten-time better resolution. This in turn, allows detecting solar flares having relatively low intensity, about 100 times lower when compared to the flares currently detected by the existing systems, owing to space-borne operations and the microchip-level miniaturization through silicon technology under space qualification.展开更多
文摘Solar flares, intense bursts of radiation, can disrupt the atmosphere and potentially affect communication, navigation and electrical systems. A newly developed miniaturised microwave radiometer used on a space-borne platform should offer astronomers unprecedented understanding of the largest explosive phenomena in our solar system. In this paper the activity and results of the EU funded research project FLARES are presented. Objective of FLARES has been the study, analysis and design of millimetre-wave system-on-chip (SoC) radiometers for space-borne detection of solar flares. Thanks to the proposed methodology, the power consumption and encumbrance (volume, weight) of the instrument can be sensibly reduced when compared to the devices currently in operation for observing and studying solar flares. In particular, the proposed SoC Dicke radiometer can achieve a ten-time better resolution. This in turn, allows detecting solar flares having relatively low intensity, about 100 times lower when compared to the flares currently detected by the existing systems, owing to space-borne operations and the microchip-level miniaturization through silicon technology under space qualification.
