Space Instrument Test Chamber (SITH) Experiment

Reaching space is costly, time-intensive, and resource-intensive. Therefore, it is important to fully calibrate scientific instruments before sending them into space. SITH is built to mimic the conditions of the Earth’s ionosphere and magnetosphere to calibrate plasma and electric field measuring instruments. To calibrate electron plasma instruments, SITH uses a 1 eV to 10 keV, Kimball physics, electron gun to generate electrons of the energies the plasma instrument would observe in space. The SITH vacuum chamber is pumped down to space-relevant pressures of less than 8 × 10-9 Torr with a combination of turbo and cryopumps. Inside the vacuum chamber a 6-axis motion stage enables complete control of detector orientation relative to the electron beam. SITH also includes an imaging microchannel plate (MCP) detector that provides measurements of the electron beam profile. Here we present initial beam characterization measurements and functional tests of a prototype plasma instrument.