Development of an LENA instrument for planetary missions by numerical simulations

Low-energy neutral atom (LENA) observations bring us important information on particle environments around celestial objects such as Mercury and the Moon. In this paper, we report on new development of an LENA instrument for planetary explorations. The instrument is light weight (2 kg), and capable of mass and energy discrimination with a large sensitivity. The performance of the instrument is investigated by numerical simulations. By using our new computer code, we calculated 3D particle trajectories including ionization, neutralization, surface scattering, and secondary electron creation. This enables us to obtain detailed performance characterization of LENA measurements. We also made trajectory tracing of photons entering the instrument to acquire photon rejection capability. This LENA instrument has been selected for both the Indian lunar exploration mission Chandrayaan-1 and European–Japanese Mercury exploration mission BepiColombo.