Eight years of solar observations with PICARD

Mustapha Meftah (1) , Thierry Corbard (2, 3) , Frédéric Morand (2) , Catherine Renaud (2) , Rabah Ikhlef (4) , Mammar Fodil (4) , Luc Damé (5) , André-Jean Vieau (6)

1 STRATO - LATMOS
2 LAGRANGE - Joseph Louis LAGRANGE
3 Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur
4 OCA - Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur
5 HELIOS - LATMOS
6 LATMOS - Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales

PICARD is a mission devoted to solar variability observation, which aims at perpetuating valuable historical time-series of the solar radius. PICARD contains a double program with in-space and on-ground measurements using Ritchey-Chrétien telescopes. The PICARD spacecraft was launched on June 15, 2010, commissioned in-flight in October of the same year, and was retired in April 2014. PICARD ground-based observatory is functional since May 2011 in the Plateau de Calern (France), and is still operational today. We shall give an overview of the PICARD instrumentation and the performances of the existing ground-based telescope. We will also present our current results about solar radius variations after eight years of solar observations.

Domains: Solar and Stellar Astrophysics [astro-ph.SR]

Mustapha Meftah, Thierry Corbard, Frédéric Morand, Catherine Renaud, Rabah Ikhlef, et al.. Eight years of solar observations with PICARD. SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2018 - Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems VII, Jun 2018, Austin, United States. pp.107041F, ⟨10.1117/12.2311716⟩. ⟨insu-01841599⟩