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Recent developments of ASPIICS: a giant solar coronagraph for the ESA/PROBA-3 formation flying mission

PROBA-3 is a technology mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), devoted to the in-orbit demonstration of formation flying techniques and technologies. Presently in phase B, PROBA-3 will implement a coronagraph (called ASPIICS, “Association de Satellites Pour l'Imagerie et l'Interferometrie de la Couronne Solaire”) that will both demonstrate and exploit the capabilities and performance of formation flying. ASPIICS is distributed on two spacecrafts separated by 140m with the external occulting disk hosted by one spacecraft and the telescope (optical camera included) on the other one. ASPIICS will perform high spatial resolution imaging of the solar corona from the coronal base (1.04 solar radii) out to 3 solar radii. ASPIICS is developed by a large consortium of European Institutes and Industries from Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg and Russia. The design studies concern the external occulter mounted on one satellite and the telescope on the other one but also the additional metrology tools that will help checking the formation and ensure that the flight configuration is optimal for observations. PROBA-3/ASPIICS successfully passed the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) in April 2013 and is currently in the implementation phase C/D. The present paper will provide the current status of PROBA-3/ASPIICS, a description of the instrument and its expected performance.