In-Flight Calibration Systems for Particle Detector Experiments

This paper briefly reviews some in-flight calibration systems used on satellite particle detector experiments and gives a detailed description of the technique used to calibrate the IMP-I Solar Proton Monitoring Experiment (SPME). A short discussion of each calibration technique is presented in an attempt to inform the reader of the potential uses of in-flight calibration systems. The SPME in-flight calibrator illustrates the trade-offs made in the design of a calibrator for an experiment which uses silicon solid state detectors. A meaningful measure of detector performance is obtained by use of a noise monitor which measures the effective average noise of the detectors with ± 2% accuracy over a 10:1 dynamic range and a 5 MHz bandwidth. In addition, the SPME incorporates a pulser which makes a ± 2% check of amplifier gains and discriminator level settings by applying a piecewise linear envelope of charge pulses to the charge sensitive preamplifiers.