The objective of this research is the statistical study of space weather e ects on im-
age detectors in Low Earth Orbit. The Hubble Space Telescope is used as a resource
for acquiring proton a ected images for statistical analysis. For the purpose of the
present work, the space weather environment will consist of cosmic as well as solar
proton particles. The proton occurrences evident in images from the Hubble Charge
Coupled Device (CCD) have been used to calculate the probability of proton events,
which is related to the local space weather particle
ux. The proton particles transfer
energy to the CCD silicon, which ultimately results in measured signal that is not
originating from photon illumination. The signal due to the proton interactions is
rst separated from the noise contribution and subsequently used in the determi-
nation of a pulse height probability distribution. Separation of the noise from the
proton events also leads to the measurement of proton streak lengths and orientations
along with the associated probability distributions. The directionality of the space
weather environment in Low Earth Orbit is examined using the distribution of proton
streak angles. Statistics found from the Hubble are also used as a starting point for
simulations that create synthetic proton signal images. The distributions resulting
from the Hubble CCD analysis give the probability of the: number of proton events,
which is related to the
ux of the space weather protons; energy of proton events,
which allows estimates of damaging proton interactions; length of proton streaks on
the CCD, which shows the relative probability of a long traversing proton event; angle
of proton event, which indicates the directionality of the space weather environment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-08-8444 |
| Date | 2010 August 1900 |
| Creators | Johnson, Adam Alan |
| Contributors | Karpetis, Adonios |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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