Characterization and Removal of HIS TOF Accidental Tails

Abstract

Solar Orbiter is a space probe which launched in February of 2020 and is currently orbiting the Sun over its polar regions. Its goal is to use its various instruments to collect data on the sun. The specific instrument I am working with is the Solar Orbiter’s Heavy Ion Sensor. This sensor collects various types of ion data from the sun’s solar wind. One such type of data collected is the energy per charge of the ion and the time of flight of the ion, which is how long it takes for the ion to pass through the sensor. These data points are plotted as the energy per charge versus the time of flight and are used to characterize what elements the ions passing through the sensor are. However, sometimes when ions are passing through the sensor, multiple can pass through, triggering the sensor to either register a very short or a very long time of flight. This is what’s known as a time of flight accidental and is invalid data. This project developed and tested multiple methods to characterize and eliminate these time of flight accidentals through the use of the programming language IDL.