Project information
SPACE - Soft Proton Athena Contamination Exploration Experiment (SPACE)

The upcoming ESA mission, Athena, will suffer the same (soft) proton contamination as seen in the current generation of X-ray telescopes, which has caused 40% of observing time loss. It is hypothesized that soft proton contamination originates from solar wind and space weather effects, although the physical processes that trigger this background are still poorly understood. Using contaminated X-ray and archived solar wind data, I will develop a soft proton background model to reduce time loss.