• Klaus Torkar, Co-Principal Investigator
• Harald Jeszenszky, Technical Manager
• Wolfgang Baumjohann, Data Analysis
• Helfried Biernat, Data Analysis
• Magda Delva, Thermal Analyses
• Gerhard Fremuth, Hardware and Software Development
• Franz Giner, Ground Support Software
• Christoph Kürbisch, Hardware
• Helmut Lammer, Data Analysis, Modelling
• Herbert Lichtenegger, Data Analysis, Modelling
• Sonja Neukirchner, Hardware
• Gustav Prattes, Hardware, Software
• Robert Wallner, Hardware

An international team lead by IWF has been selected by ESA to provide a Planetary Ion Camera (PICAM)for the payload of the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO). The instrument PICAM is an ion mass spectrometer operating as an all-sky camera for charged particles to study the chain of processes by which neutrals are ejected from the soil, eventually ionised and transported through the environment of Mercury.

It will provide the mass composition, energy and angular distribution of low energy ions up to 3 keV in the environment of Mercury. These observations will uniquely allow to study the low energy particles emitted from the surface of Mercury, their source regions, composition and ejection mechanisms, and to monitor the solar wind which may impinge on the surface and constitutes a major ejection process. This will allow to better understand the formation of Mercury's tenuous atmosphere and its magnetospheric plasma.

PICAM combines high spatial resolution, simultaneous measurements in a full 2 p field of view with a mass range extending up to ~132 amu (Xenon) and a mass resolution better than ~100 to provide superior overall performance in the frame of the mission. PICAM is part of the SERENA instrument suite of four neutral particle and ion sensors.

PICAM consists of a sensor with ion optics and the detector, and an attached electronics box with dedicated low and high voltage power supplies, coordinate determination and time-of-flight electronics, and a controller. The data are transferred to the common System Control Unit of SERENA.

The PICAM Team is an international cons or tium. The IWF is leading this investigation and provides the controller electronics f or the instrument.

Further information on PICAM is found here: http://picam.iwf.oeaw.ac.at/

 

• Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences
• CETP - Centre d'Etude des Environnements Terrestre et Planétaires CNRS, Obs. de Saint-Maur, France
• IKI - Space Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
• MPS - Max Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany
• KFKI/RMKI - Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Department of Space Physics, Budapest, Hungary
• BIRA-IASB - Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, Brussels, Belgium
• Space Science Department, ESA/ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands
• STIL - National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland
• CETP-CNRS - Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Paris, France
• IPSL/Service d'Aeronomie du CNRS, Paris, France
• SwRI - Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX, USA
• UFA-CAS - Institute of Atmospheric Physics AS CR, Prague, Czechia
• CSSAR - Center for Space Science and Applied Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
• Sheffield University, Sheffield, United Kingdom