DEPARTMENT 4 : Solar Physics
BOLD
BOLD (Blind to the Optical Light Detectors) is an innovative international project coordinated at the Royal Observatory of Belgium.
More than ten institutes participate, and particularly IMEC, Leuven, in charge of the industrial management. Laboratories in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are bringing the needed expertise.
The future space missions for solar observation require ultraviolet (UV) imaging devices surpassing the present state of the art. In order to understand the Corona, and to predict its eruptions, which have sometimes a detrimental impact on our planet, improving the spatial resolution and the cadence of the movies is crucial.
The smaller the events, the faster they evolve. The overall sensitivity of our telescopes should therefore be ideally improved by a factor of more than a thousand.
The Solar Orbiter (ESA) will be launched in 2015, and will bring part of the solution by having an orbit five times closer to the Sun than the Earth. The consecutive gain in signal is 25, but this is not yet quite sufficient, and the radiative environment will also increase much.
Now, a sensor based on a wide bandgap semiconductor such as diamond, will be rad-hard and solar-blind. The latter will allow removing some of the filters mentioned below, thus increasing the global sensitivity of the telescopes.
BOLD intends to demonstrate within 2 years the feasibility of this concept.
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