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Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2020: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray; Virtual, Online; United States; 14 December 2020 through 18 December 2020; Code 166330.--Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering Volume 11444, 2020, Article number 114448S.--Full list of authors: Gasent-Blesa, J. L.; Reglero, V.; Connell, P.; Pinazo-Herrero, B.; Navarro-González, J.; Rodríguez-Martínez, P.; Castro-Tirado, A. J.; Caballero-García, M. D.; Amati, L.; Labanti, C.; Mereghetti, S.; Frontera, F.; Campana, R.; Orlandini, M.; Stephen, J.; Terenzi, L.; Evangelisti, F.; Squerzanti, S.; Melchiorri, M.; Fuschino, F. De Rosa, A.; Morgante, G., Within the scientific goals of the THESEUS ESA/M5 candidate mission, a critical item is a fast (within a few s) and accurate (, THESEUS/XGIS instrument is supported by: the ASI-INAF Agreement n. 2018-29-HH.0; the OHB Italia/INAF-OASBo Agreement n.2331/2020/01; the European Space Agency ESA through the M5/NPMC Programme; the AHEAD2020 project funded by the UE through H2020-INFRAIA-2018-2020; the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaci?n, PID2019 109269RB-C41; the Polish National Science Centre, Project 2019/35/B/ST9/03944 and Foundation for Polish Science, Project POIR.04.04.00-00-5C65/17-00. The authors thank all the members of the THESEUS team involved in the development of XGIS instrument.

Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2020: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray; Virtual, Online; United States; 14 December 2020 through 18 December 2020; Code 166330.--Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering Volume 11444, 2020, Article number 114442K.--Full list of authors: Labanti, C.; Amati, L.; Frontera, F.; Mereghetti, S.; Gasent-Blesa, J. L.; Tenzer, C.; Orleanski, P.; Kuvvetli, I.; Campana, R.; Fuschino, F.; Terenzi, L.; Virgilli, E.; Morgante, G.; Orlandini, M.; Butler, R. C.; Stephen, J. B.; Auricchio, N.; De Rosa, A.; Da Ronco, V.; Evangelisti, F. Melchiorri, M.; Squerzanti, S.; Fiorini, M.; Bertuccio, G.; Mele, F.; Gandola, M.; Malcovati, P.; Grassi, M.; Bellutti, P.; Borghi, G.; Ficorella, F.; Picciotto, A.; Zanini, V.; Zorzi, N.; Demenev, E.; Rashevskaya, I.; Rachevski, A.; Zampa, G.; Vacchi, A.; Zampa, N.; Baldazzi, G.; La Rosa, G.; Sottile, G.; Volpe, A.; Winkler, M.; Reglero, V.; Connell, P. H.; Pinazo-Herrero, B.; Navarro-González, J.; Rodríguez-Martínez, P.; Castro-Tirado, A. J.; Santangelo, A.; Hedderman, P.; Lorenzi, P.; Sarra, P.; Pedersen, S. M.; Tcherniak, D.; Guidorzi, C.; Rosati, P.; Trois, A.; Piazzolla, R., THESEUS (Transient High Energy Sky and Early Universe Surveyor) is one of the three missions selected by ESA as fifth medium class mission (M5) candidates in its Cosmic Vision science program, currently under assessment in a phase A study with a planned launch date in 2032. THESEUS is designed to carry on-board two wide and deep sky monitoring instruments for X/gamma-ray transients detection: a wide-field soft X-ray monitor with imaging capability (Soft X-ray Imager, SXI, 0.3 - 5 keV), a hard X-ray, partially-imaging spectroscopic instrument (X and Gamma Imaging Spectrometer, XGIS, 2 keV - 10 MeV), and an optical/near-IR telescope with both imaging and spectroscopic capability (InfraRed Telescope, IRT, 0.7 - 1.8 µm). The spacecraft will be capable of performing fast repointing of the IRT to the error region provided by the monitors, thus allowing it to detect and localize the transient sources down to a few arcsec accuracy, for immediate identification and redshift determination. The prime goal of the XGIS will be to detect transient sources, with monitoring timescales down to milliseconds, both independently of, or following up, SXI detections, and identify the sources performing localisation at, The Phase A study of the THESEUS/XGIS instrument is supported by ASI-INAF Agreement n. 2018-29-HH.0, OHB Italia/ - INAF-OASBo Agreement n.2331/2020/01, by the European Space Agency ESA through the M5/NPMC Programme and by the AHEAD2020 project funded by UE through H2020-INFRAIA-2018-2020. By the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, PID2019-109269RB-C41. By Polish National Science Center, Project 2019/35/B/ST9/03944 and Foundation for Polish Science, Project POIR.04.04.00-00-5C65/17-00.

We present a software simulator for the modeling of astronomical instrumentation, which includes platform effects and software processing. It is an end-to-end simulator, from the entrance of the telescope to the data acquisition at the detector, along with software blocks dealing, e.g., with demodulation, inversion, and compression. Developed following the Solar Orbiter/Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (SO/PHI) instrument, it comprises elements such as a filtergraph, polarimetric modulator, detector, vibrations, and accumulations. Through these, the simulator performs most of the analyses that can be done with light in astronomy, such as differential photometry, spectroscopy, and polarimetry. The simulator is coded with high flexibility and ease of implementation of new effects and subsystems. Thus, it allows for the user to adapt it to a wide variety of instruments, even not exclusively solar ones, as illustrated with an example of application to a night-time observation. The simulator can provide support in the phase of instrument design and help assess tolerances and test solutions to underperformances arising during the instrument operations. All this makes SOPHISM a very valuable tool for all the stages of astronomical instrument definition, design, operation, and lifetime tracking evaluation. © 2018. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved., This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, through Projects ESP2013-47349-C6, ESP2014-56169-C6, and ESP2016-77548-C5, including a percentage from European FEDER funds. It was also supported by Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft-und Raumfahrt (DLR) under project 50 OT 1201. The National Solar Observatory is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

S. K. Solanki et. al., ©2017 The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.The Sunrise balloon-borne solar observatory, consisting of a 1 m aperture telescope that provides a stabilized image to a UV filter imager and an imaging vector polarimeter, carried out its second science flight in 2013 June. It provided observations of parts of active regions at high spatial resolution, including the first high-resolution images in the Mg ii k line. The obtained data are of very high quality, with the best UV images reaching the diffraction limit of the telescope at 3000 Å after Multi-Frame Blind Deconvolution reconstruction accounting for phase-diversity information. Here a brief update is given of the instruments and the data reduction techniques, which includes an inversion of the polarimetric data. Mainly those aspects that evolved compared with the first flight are described. A tabular overview of the observations is given. In addition, an example time series of a part of the emerging active region NOAA AR 11768 observed relatively close to disk center is described and discussed in some detail. The observations cover the pores in the trailing polarity of the active region, as well as the polarity inversion line where flux emergence was ongoing and a small flare-like brightening occurred in the course of the time series. The pores are found to contain magnetic field strengths ranging up to 2500 G, and while large pores are clearly darker and cooler than the quiet Sun in all layers of the photosphere, the temperature and brightness of small pores approach or even exceed those of the quiet Sun in the upper photosphere., The German contribution to Sunrise and its reflight was funded by the Max Planck Foundation, the Strategic Innovations Fund of the President of the Max Planck Society (MPG), DLR, and private donations by supporting members of the Max Planck Society, which is gratefully acknowledged. The Spanish contribution was funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under Projects ESP2013-47349-C6 and ESP2014-56169-C6, partially using European FEDER funds. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The HAO contribution was partly funded through NASA grant number NNX13AE95G. This work was partly supported by the BK21 plus program through the National Research Foundation (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education of Korea. L.G. acknowledges research funding from the State of Lower Saxony, Germany. SDO is a mission of NASA's Living With a Star (LWS) program. The SDO/HMI data were provided by the Joint Science Operation Center (JSOC). The National Solar Observatory (NSO) is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) Inc. under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

This paper describes the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager on the Solar Orbiter mission (SO/PHI), the first magnetograph and helioseismology instrument to observe the Sun from outside the Sun-Earth line. It is the key instrument meant to address the top-level science question: How does the solar dynamo work and drive connections between the Sun and the heliosphere? SO/PHI will also play an important role in answering the other top-level science questions of Solar Orbiter, as well as hosting the potential of a rich return in further science. SO/PHI measures the Zeeman effect and the Doppler shift in the FeI 617.3nm spectral line. To this end, the instrument carries out narrow-band imaging spectro-polarimetry using a tunable LiNbO_3 Fabry-Perot etalon, while the polarisation modulation is done with liquid crystal variable retarders (LCVRs). The line and the nearby continuum are sampled at six wavelength points and the data are recorded by a 2kx2k CMOS detector. To save valuable telemetry, the raw data are reduced on board, including being inverted under the assumption of a Milne-Eddington atmosphere, although simpler reduction methods are also available on board. SO/PHI is composed of two telescopes; one, the Full Disc Telescope (FDT), covers the full solar disc at all phases of the orbit, while the other, the High Resolution Telescope (HRT), can resolve structures as small as 200km on the Sun at closest perihelion. The high heat load generated through proximity to the Sun is greatly reduced by the multilayer-coated entrance windows to the two telescopes that allow less than 4% of the total sunlight to enter the instrument, most of it in a narrow wavelength band around the chosen spectral line., Comment: 36 pages, 41 figures