Magnetic Field/Electric Field Instruments
DWP
The Digital Wave Processing Experiment (DWP) on the Cluster-II spacecraft, is a component of the Wave Experiment Consortium. The wide variety of geophysical plasmas that will be investigated by the Cluster mission contain waves with a frequency range from DC to over 100 kHz with both magnetic and electric components. The characteristic duration of these waves extends from a few milliseconds to minutes and a dynamic range of over 90 dB is desired. The DWP instrument employs a novel architecture based on the use of transputers with parallel processing and re-alloctable tasks to provide a high-reliability flexible system. DWP is responsible for coordinating WEC operations at several levels. At the lowest level, DWP provides electrical signals to synchronise instrument sampling. At higher levels, DWP time tags data in a consistent manner and provides a facility for constructing more complex WEC modes by means of macros. The processing system within the DWP instrument will also perform particle correlations in order to permit the study of wave/particle interactions. Particle correlation is based on forming autocorrelation functions of the time series of particle detector counts as a function of energy and pitch angle. The basic operations are carried out in DWP resident software using algorithms developed for AMPTE, CRRES, rocket experiments and also from computer simulations. The DWP particle correlator takes raw electron detection pulses from the PEACE instrument and performs software auto-correlation functions (ACF) that are sorted and summed according to instantaneous PEACE selected electron energy. DWP was designed and built by the Space Systems Group of the University of Sheffield. Group: Instrument_Details Entry_ID: DWP Group: Instrument_Identification Instrument_Category: Solar/Space Observing Instruments Instrument_Class: Magnetic Field/Electric Field Instruments Short_Name: DWP Long_Name: Digital Wave Processing Experiment End_Group Group: Associated_Platforms Short_Name: CLUSTER-II End_Group Online_Resource: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=33024&fbodylongid=1109 Online_Resource: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=2000-041B&ex=7 Sample_Image: http://sci.esa.int/science-e-media/img/34/hires_36660.JPG Group: Instrument_Logistics Instrument_Start_Date: 2000-07-16 Instrument_Owner: University of Sheffield, England End_Group End_Group