SUSI: The Sunrise-III UV Spectropolarimeter and Imager
One of the instruments onboard Sunrise III is the Sunrise UV Spectropolarimeter and Imager (SUSI), which covers the wavelength range from 309 nm to 417 nm, thus extending the observational capabilities of Sunrise III into the NUV. The spectrum across most of SUSI’s wavelength range has largely remained underutilized in solar physics so far. It includes thousands of spectral lines among which are more than 100 chromospheric lines, covering a height range of more than 1300 km in the solar atmosphere, seamlessly from deep photospheric to mid-upper chromospheric layers. Although the solar NUV intensity spectrum has been well observed, albeit at low spatial resolution, the polarized spectrum is poorly known.
from Feller et al. (2025)
The three SUSI cameras operate at a framerate of 47.040 fps in synchronization with the PMU.
This implies that each modulation cycle (half PMU rotation lasting 256 ms) is sampled by 12
frames of the spectrograph cameras. During pre-flight tests, the synchronization error between
cameras and PMU was measured to be below 0.36 ms, and the residual image motion due to PMU
misalignment (beam wobbling) was below the required 0.1 pixels rms.
The SUSI spectrograph is equipped with two cameras in a dual-beam polarimetric configuration which
allows suppressing measurement errors originating from residual jitter. The cameras, developed at MPS,
meet the harsh environmental requirements of a stratospheric balloon flight and are based on UV optimized
image sensors with very low noise (2 e− rms) to allow for efficient measurements in the deep, heavily
photon-starved UV spectral lines. The data are recorded at a high frame rate of 47 frames per second (fps)
to make them insensitive to residual large amplitude slow jitter of the system. All individual frames are
stored on-board. This greatly enhances our flexibility in the later data reduction, in particular in terms
of trading spatial and temporal resolution against signal-to-noise, depending on the actual science
question.
High spatial resolution context images are obtained by re-imaging the 2D solar scene around the linear
spectrograph entrance slit onto a separate camera. This setup is known as slit-jaw imaging.
The slit-jaw imager, which is strictly synchronized to the two spectrograph cameras, detects residual
jitter and optical wavefront errors. It allows for a post-facto numerical image restoration of the
spectrograph scans following the technique developed by
van Noort (2017)
that has impressively stood the test in recent ground-based observations.
SUSI special datasets
| Name | Obs. ID | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Full Spectral Scan | 05_QSUN | Short observations in all SUSI wavelength windows in the quiet Sun. |
| Full Spectral Scan | 12_FLAR | Short observations in all SUSI wavelength windows from 309 nm to 400 nm in an active region. |
| Full Spectral Scan | 22_SPOT | Short observations in all SUSI wavelength windows from 311 nm to 412 nm in an active region. |
Pipeline version and changes
You can find more details on the expected formats and data structure in our SUSI Data structure description.
| Version | Date | Spectro-Polarimeter (SP) | Slit-Jaw Imager (SJ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Produces dual beam Stokes images. | Produces reconstructed and non-reconstructed intensity images. | ||
| 1.0 | June 1st, 2026 |
Includes: Dark, bias and gain correction, smile correction and wavelength calibration, demodulation, crosstalk-correction, fringe suppression |
Includes: Dark, bias and gain correction Optional: MOMFBD image restoration |
SUSI
SUSI instrument publications
- Instrument description (Feller et al., 2025)
- Standalone polarimetric calibration (Iglesias et al., 2025)
- Spectroflat: Flatfielding and wavelength calibration (Hölken et al., 2024)
- Image restoration of solar spectra (van Noort, 2017)
- Solar Image Restoration By Use Of Multi-frame Blind De-convolution With Multiple Objects And Phase Diversity (van Noort et al., 2005)