SolACES, SOLAR Auto-Calibrating EUV/UV Spectrophotometers

SolACES (SOLAR Auto-Calibrating EUV/UV Spectrophotometers) was designed to monitor (quasi) continuously the Extreme UV (EUV) and UV radiation of the Sun in the wavelength range between 16 and 220 nm on-board the International Space Station (ISS). A novel feature of the instrument is its capability to auto-calibrate the instrument repeatedly during the whole mission via absolute flux detection inside two ionization chambers. SolACES is part of the SOLAR space science instrument package which was mounted into a Coarse Pointing Device (CPD) on the External Payload Facility of the ESA Columbus module. The CPD compensates for the ISS orbital orientation changes, and points SolACES to the Sun together with another solar science payload: the Solar Spectrum measurement instrument or SOLSPEC. This enables simultaneous and complementary measurements of the two instruments for the spectral irradiance between 16 nm and 3 μm. SolACES dataset provides spectral solar irradiance in W.m-2.nm-1 covered by four spectrophotometer channels SP1: 16-58 nm SP2: 32-100 nm SP3: 40-150 nm SP4: 115-226 nm All SolACES are available at data http://isssolac.esac.esa.int/iss-solaces/ and http://www.solaces.eu/