Progress on Development of the Electron Spectrometer Telescope

The Pitch REsolving Spectroscopy for Electron Transport (PRESET) mission aims to measure the pitch-angle dependent electron spectrum in the outer Van Allen Belt’s. This will provide high angular resolution measurements of the electron spectrum within the loss cone for use in development of ionospheric-atmospheric models. To this end the Electron Spectrometer Telescope (EST) is being developed. The EST is a small form factor electron spectrometer based on silicon strip detectors in a telescopic configuration, read out using a set of VATA460.3 ASICs. In this paper we discuss development and testing of the EST hardware. The newly designed BB37(SS) silicon strip detectors are tested for energy and spatial resolution using a VATA460.3 ASIC designed for strip detector read-out. The results are compared with those collected using a commercial pulse processing system connected to the BB37(SS) detectors. The maximum number of strips per channel with acceptable energy resolution is determined to reduce power consumption and instrument cost. A prototype version of the EST containing the custom electronic read out is tested on a high altitude balloon flight. Performance of the current front-end and data acquisition modules and the spectra collected during the flight are discussed.