The EUV Imager on Lagrange

Abstract: The Lagrange eUv Coronal Imager (LUCI) was a solar imager in the Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) being developed as a prototype for the European Space Agency (ESA) Vigil mission, a mission designed to be positioned at the L5 Lagrangian point to monitor space weather from its source on the Sun, through the heliosphere, to the Earth. LUCI was specifically designed as an operational instrument, and space weather forecasting teams were used to help make appropriate design choices. In particular: LUCI was designed to use an off-axis two mirror design equipped with an EUV enhanced active pixel sensor. This type of detector has advantages that promise to be very beneficial for monitoring the source of space weather in the EUV. LUCI boasted a novel off-axis wide field-of-view, designed to observe the solar disk, the lower corona, and the extended solar atmosphere close to the Sun-Earth line. Since the NASA solicitation for a Principal Investigator led Heliophysics Space Weather Science Program Focused Mission of Opportunity investigation for a remote sensing EUV imager instrument, to be hosted on the Vigil mission, this design has been revisited. In this presentation I will discuss some of the design choices that went into the LUCI instrument, the space weather forecaster requirements (detection and monitoring of semi-static coronal structures such as coronal holes, prominences, and active regions; as well as transient phenomena such as solar flares, limb coronal mass ejections, EUV waves, and coronal dimmings), and the novel instrument choices incorporated.