Speaker
Description
Since the launch in July 2023, Euclid operations were characterized by an intense solar activity. Solar energetic particles (SEP), hitting the sixteen H2RG detectors of the Near Infrared Photometer and Spectrometer (NISP) instrument, contribute to the scientific signal noise. In the most extreme cases, making NISP data invalid for scientific purposes. In this talk, we will present a comprehensive analysis of NISP dark images collected from August 2023 to date which aims to study the possible correlation of NISP artifacts with SEP. In particular, snowballs are bright transient events of mostly circular shape, with a nearly or fully saturated core, and covering tens to hundreds of pixels. By exploiting an ad-hoc algorithm that combines the NISP signal and quality factor, snowballs and cosmic rays candidates were identified in the NISP images Since their physical origin is still under debate, we correlate the snowball rate with SEP flux measurements from GOES satellite. An eventual correlation could explain the observed difference with the snowball rate measured on NISP ground based tests.