Preliminary Results of the SISTINE-2 Sounding Rocket Observation of our Stellar Neighbor Procyon A

On November 8^th 2021, Procyon A was observed on the second flight of the Suborbital Imaging Spectrograph for Transition-region Irradiance from Nearby Exoplanet host stars (SISTINE-2) sounding rocket payload. SISTINE-2 successfully obtained the far ultraviolet (FUV; 1010 – 1270 and 1300 – 1565 Å) spectrum of Procyon A, making the first simultaneous observation of several key FUV emission features (O VI; 1032/1038 Å, Lyα; 1215 Å, N V; 1238/1243 Å, and C IV; 1548/1551 Å) on an F-type star. SISTINE was designed to investigate the high energy radiation environment around exoplanet host stars, or representative stars such as Procyon A. The nearby (3.51 pc) F5 IV-V star Procyon A is approaching the end of its life on the main sequence; we observed this star to measure the radiation environment around an evolving star. Some emission features, such as Lyα and C IV, drive photochemistry in exoplanetary atmospheres, while others, such as O VI and N V, serve as proxies to the difficult to observe extreme ultraviolet stellar emission. The SISTINE instrument consists of an f/14 Cassegrain telescope which feeds a ~2.1x magnifying FUV imaging spectrograph. In support of future NASA missions, SISTINE serves as a test bed for multiple UV hardware technologies such as enhanced LiF (eLiF) protective optical coatings, protective AlF₃ optical overcoating applied using atomic layer deposition (ALD), and a large format (113 × 42 mm) microchannel plate (MCP) detector with ALD processed borosilicate plates. These enabling technologies combine to achieve an FUV instrument with four reflective optics and a peak effective area of ~100 cm². We present the preliminary science results of the flight data, and discuss the future assembly of a full high energy spectral energy distribution (SED) of Procyon A through the use of archival data.