Fundamental Technologies ACE EPAM Pages

Fundamental Technologies

ACE EPAM Pages

Advanced Composition Explorer
Energetic Proton and Alpha Monitor

Overview and Table of Contents

The Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft was launched in August 1997. Carrying 6 high-resolution sensors and 3 monitoring instruments, ACE samples low energy solar particles and high energy galactic particles and provides near real time, 24/7 continuous coverage of the solar wind and higher energy particles accelerated by the sun, from a distance of about 1.5 million km from Earth.

The EPAM (Electron, Proton and Alpha Monitor) instrument, built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, consists of 5 telescope apertures which use the spin of the spacecraft to sweep the full sky:

2 Low Energy Magnetic Spectrometers (LEMS)	Measure flux and direction of ions greater than 50 keV
2 Low Energy Foil Spectrometers (LEFS)	Measure flux and direction of electrons above 30 keV
1 Composition Aperture(CA)	Measures elemental composition of the ions

EPAM Data at Fundamental Technologies
Publications
HISCALE and EPAM Science, news and comments regarding the HISCALE and EPAM work at Fundamental Technologies (a blog by Doug Patterson)
Additional information:
- Electron, Proton, and Alpha Monitor on the Advanced Composition Explorer Spacecraft, Space Science Reviews paper which describes EPAM and its capabilities.
- ACE Lessons Learned and Final Report (at Caltech) - pdf document
- ACE EPAM Home Page at the Applied Physics Laboratory
- ACE data documentation at Caltech, including data processing and archiving procedures, description of ACE data levels, documentation for browse data, level 1 data, level 2 data, etc., space telemetry formats, and more.

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Last modified Sept. 29, 2009
T. Hunt-Ward
tizby@ftecs.com