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Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

INSPIRESat-1/DAXSS (AKA MinXSS-3) Level 1 data available

June 6, 2022
Three example spectra from DAXSS showing a solar flare in red (highest irradiance), quiet sun in black (middle irradiance), and a spectrum taken while the spacecraft was just moving behind the earth so that sunlight passes through Earth’s atmosphere before reaching the spacecraft (blue; lowest irradiance).

INSPIRESat-1 launched on 2022-02-14 into a sun-synchronous, dawn-dusk orbit. That means that it almost never experiences orbit eclipse and therefore has an almost entirely uninterrupted view of the sun. Even in the <4 months since launch, hundreds of solar flares have been observed. Not all of the DAXSS data for them have been downlinked yet, but we do have many interesting events already available for analysis. So today, we are publicly releasing the DAXSS Level 1 data product. Most of those data are focused around solar flares rather than the times between, but as the mission continues we will be obtaining more data. The DAXSS data products for the other levels are currently in work (e.g., we need to finish documenting all of the metadata) and will be released soon. We chose to release level 1 first because it is the primary science data product and the most relevant for the majority of the community.

Happy analyzing!

Check it out on our data page.

Spectrum with a linear vertical axis instead of the typical log scaling, which makes some of the emission lines at low energies much easier to see.