Civilian and military spacecraft systems, communications, detection, tracking and surveillance activities can be endangered or degraded by solar activity. The sun induces these disturbances through magnetic field disturbances, electromagnetic and charged particle irradiation of the earth's upper atmospheres. One method of circumventing serious consequences of this activity is through space based monitoring and prediction of solar active regions. One such monitoring device that is receiving much attention is the NASA/MSFC solar vector magnetograph (SVM). To meet requirements, the SVM must provide full solar disc monitoring (32 arc min) with 5 arc second spatial resolution in the normal monitoring mode, then 5 arc minute field of view and 0.5 arc second spatial resolution when specific active areas are of interest. To do this, the SVM solid state detector must be a large array (2048 x 2048 pixels or larger) which will provide massive amounts (5 x 108 bits/magnetogram) of data for retrieval, processing, compression, storage and relay to ground stations. Both of the above requirements are state-of-the-art. It is proposed herein to provide preliminary conceptual designs of a compatible large array solid state detector and data acquisition and control system (DACS) for the SVM.
