The low energy magnetic spectrometer on Ulysses and ACE response to near relativistic protons

¹ Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física experimental de Partículas (LIP), Avenida Elias Garcia, 1000-149 Lisboa, Portugal
² CICGE, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Observatório Astronómico Professor Manuel de Barros, 4430-146 Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal
e-mail: dmaia@fc.up.pt
³ Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey 07102, USA
⁴ Fundamental Technologies, LLC, 2411 Ponderosa Dr. Lawrence, KS 66046, USA

Received: 24 February 2015
Accepted: 25 March 2015

Abstract

Aims. We show that the Heliosphere Instrument for Spectra Composition and Anisotropy at Low Energies (HISCALE) on board the Ulysses spacecraft and the Electron Proton Alpha Monitor (EPAM) on board the Advance Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft can be used to measure properties for ion populations with kinetic energies in excess of 1 GeV. This previously unexplored source of information is valuable for understanding the origin of near relativistic ions of solar origin.

Methods. We model the instrumental response from the low energy magnetic spectrometers from EPAM and HISCALE using a Monte Carlo approach implemented in the Geant4 toolkit to determine the response of different energy channels to energies up to 5 GeV. We compare model results with EPAM observations for 2012 May 17 ground level solar cosmic ray event, including directional fluxes.

Results. For the 2012 May event, all the ion channels in EPAM show an onset more than one hour before ions with the highest nominal energy range (1.8 to 4.8 MeV) were expected to arrive. We show from Monte Carlo simulations that the timing at different channels, the ratio between counts at the different channels, and the directional fluxes within a given channel, are consistent with and can be explained by the arrival of particles with energies from 35 MeV to more than 1 GeV. Onset times for the EPAM penetrating protons are consistent with the rise seen in neutron monitor data, implying that EPAM and ground neutron monitors are seeing overlapping energy ranges and that both are consistent with GeV ions being released from the Sun at 10:38 UT.