High-speed pitch angle sorter

Abstract

A high-speed method was developed to compress the two-dimensional angular distribution of space particles gathered by space plasma instrumentation into the angle distribution, where the pitch angle is polar angle with respect to the ambient magnetic field. The pitch angle sorter can handle rates of up to 2 MHz and it is designed to accommodate high angular resolution plasma analyzers that are placed on a rotating spacecraft. This compression is achieved by relying on digitally encoded lookup tables to eliminate all arithmetic operations while applying the high symmetry of this compression to reduce the amount of digital memory.