The Solar Particle Acceleration, Radiation and Kinetics (SPARK) mission: a mission to understand the nature of particle acceleration

Presentation #408.04 in the session High-energy Solar Investigations through Next-generation Remote Sensing: Spectroscopy, Imaging, and Beyond I.

by Sophie Musset, Hamish Reid, Frédéric Auchère, Krzysztof Barczynski, Philippa Browning, Eric Buchlin, Ariadna Calcines Rosario, Steven Christe, Guilio Del-Zanna, Carsten Denker, Robertus Edelyi, Lyndsay Fletcher, Andrzej Fludra, Samuel Gissot, Lindsay Glesener, Iain Hannah, Louise Harra, Miho Janvier, Natasha Jeffrey, Christian Kintziger, Ludwig Klein, Eduard Kontar, Sam Krucker, Philippe Laurent, Olivier Limousin, David Long, Gottfried Mann, Sarah Matthews, Ryan Milligan, Valery Nakariakov, Susanna Parenti, Melissa Pesce-Rollins, Pascal Saint-Hilaire, Albert Shih, Luca Teriaca, Tom Van Doorsselaere, Nicole Vilmer, and Alexander Warmuth

Published onOct 20, 2022

The Sun is the most powerful particle accelerator within the solar system, and its proximity provides one of the best opportunities to analyze and understand the universal process of particle acceleration in natural and magnetized plasmas. The Solar Particle Acceleration, Radiation and Kinetics (SPARK) mission is being proposed as an ESA M-class mission to address the following overarching question: What are the astrophysical conditions present in energy release and acceleration sites, and in the environment in which accelerated particles propagate and deposit their energy? SPARK will target the extremes of the particle acceleration process, with a suite of four instruments observing in EUV, X-ray and gamma-ray ranges, and will address the details of the processes responsible for ion acceleration and their relationship to electron acceleration, which represent a significant gap in our understanding of particle acceleration in the Universe, and in particular on the Sun.