Electron temperature probe

Abstract

The electron temperature probe (ETP) was invented in Japan in 1970's. The probe measures the electron temperature accurately and the measurement is not influenced by the electrode contamination. The instrument has low weight, low data transmission bit rate and low power consumption. The probe has been deployed in many sounding rockets, Earth orbiting scientific satellites, and Mars exploration spacecraft in Japan. The probe has also been deployed in sounding rockets in West Germany, India, Canada, USA, and Brazil. The probe has also been deployed in Brazilian satellites, Korean satellites, and recently as a Taiwan satellite payload. The manuscript describes the principle of the ETP instrument, the system configuration, the mechanical interface with respect to the sensor location, the control timing between data processing units; some useful information, the interference with other instruments, and future improvements and tasks. Some useful information for conducting performance check after the instrument fabrication and before the flight deployment is also presented in Appendix A.