Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The PWI system consists of three receiver components as follows:
(1) EWO: Composite of electric field detector (EFD), waveform capture
(WFC), and onboard frequency analyser (OFA).
(2) SORBET: “Spectroscopie des Ondes Radio & du Bruit Electrostatique
Thermique” (Spectroscopy of radio waves and thermal electrostatic
noise).
(3) Active measurement of mercury's plasma (AM
2
P).
These receiver components are connected to the corresponding sensors
through the sensor preamplifiers. Figure 3 shows a block diagram.
3.1.
Sensors for electric field and magnetic field
Two pairs of electric field sensors are orthogonally installed in the spacecraft
spin plane. They will be deployed after Mercury orbit insertion. The total
length after deployment is 32 m tip-to-tip for each of them. One pair of
electric field sensor is the WPT based on heritage from the PANT system for
EFD and PWI onboard the Geotail spacecraft.
5
,
6
It consists of a conductive
PWI-E
AM
2
P-E
DB-SC
SC-Pre
SORBET
MEFISTO-S
AM
2
P-S
MEFISTO
-E
MDP
(CPU/
RAM)
MEFISTO Drive
WPT-S
EFD
WPT-Pre
WPT Drive
OFA/
WFC
LF-SC
x 2 (for
E
, and
B
)
WPT-E
SC-Pre
DB-SC
Fig. 3.
Block diagram of the PWI system.
