The Solar Wind Plasma Sensor for the SWFO-L1 Mission: Flight Model Performance

The Solar Wind Plasma Sensor (SWiPS) is an instrument on the upcoming joint NOAA/NASA Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) mission. The SWFO-L1 mission objectives are to establish operational capability and continuity of space weather observational requirements and enable space weather watches, warnings, forecasts, and predictions from the Sun-Earth Lagrange 1 point over a 5-year period starting in 2025. The SWiPS sensor design contains two sensors capable of measuring ions from ~0.17 – 32 keV/q to provide solar wind velocity measurements up to 2500 km/s during potential extreme space weather events. SWiPS data products include solar wind ion velocity, temperature, density and dynamic pressure. These are provided in near real-time to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and used to characterize Space Weather causing events such as CMEs, interplanetary shocks, corotating interaction regions, and high-speed flows associated with coronal holes. In this presentation, we describe the SWiPS flight model performance through environmental testing and final ion beam calibration.